Developing eWrite

Almost 2 weeks ago on the 9^th, eWrite was the focus of the Tuesday Push. I was really looking forward to this push in the days leading up to it. I spent the time improving our site, removing unwanted pages, setting up a new forum, getting new images created for the site and setting up an online store where users can now buy eWrite Lite and eWrite Messenger.

The Tuesday push works on several levels. A dealine is always useful to focus on whats important and in what order. I worked that bit harder to get a few things in place, mainly the online store to sell our apps complete with an easy to follow set up proceedure.

The morning of the Tueday Push I was excited and looking forward to seeing what people would write about eWrite. At the same time I was worried about the content of our site, I know it still isn’t up to scratch to explain our apps very well. In this case, I looked on it as a way to improve, if bloggers commented on the content of the the site, I’d be able to learn from it and change it.

Damien Mulley wrote the first blog post that morning and for a lot of the rest of the day my heart was in my mouth, no other blog posts about eWrite were appearing. I began to worry that no one else would bother writing about us, I doubt I’ve ever used the Google Blog search as much as I did that day

As the day went on though I was very happy to see a few more blogs participate in the Tuesday Push. Google Alerts began to tell me about new blog posts by email. The traffic to the site more than doubled that day and continues even now at a higher average per day.

Traffic to the site was flowing in. Nearly 20 people used the demo of the eWrite Lite CMS on our site that day. I wish I had the demo of the eWrite Messenger email marking software ready in time. I think this might have impressed a couple of people. Every day since, an average of 5 people try out the demo on our site compared to 1 or 2 per week before.

I received a couple of emails from other web developers and graphic designers asking questions about eWrite Lite and how it works with a website. I was especially happy with these emails as Im hoping to work with more and more developers to see if I can encourage them to use eWrite Lite to manage the content of their sites. I want to learn what I can to make it a more useful tool for developers and designers in their own work.

The blogs that wrote about eWrite in the Tuesday Push

http://www.mulley.net/2008/09/09/tuesday-push-9th-september-2008-ewrite-lite/

http://www.keyes.ie/johnnyk/2008/09/18/ewrite-lite/

http://www.niall-larkin.com/blog/2008/09/09/get-yourself-on-techcrunch-or-digg-rewrite-the-web-with-ewrite/

http://www.web2ireland.org/2008/09/09/the-tuesday-push-is-ewrite-lite/

http://www.iarfhlaith.com/2008/09/09/tuesday-push-ewrite-lite/

http://bohanna.typepad.com/pureplay/2008/09/ewrite—2-days.html

http://joedrumgoole.com/blog/2008/09/09/the-tuesday-push-ewrite-lite/

http://www.davidkelly.ie/blog/2008/09/10/ewritehaving-a-tuesday-push/

http://www.bytesurgery.com/blog/2008/09/09/pushing-ewrite-lite-pushing-ireland/

http://eirepreneur.blogs.com/eirepreneur/2008/09/a-day-late-but.html

(I haven’t missed anyone have I ? )

Thank you very very much to all, Thank for you for taking the time to look at eWrite and writing about it. I’ve learned a lot from the posts and comments and taking on board all the advise and suggestions.

Getting your application or service mentioned in the Tuesday Push is definitely worthwhile, do it!

Robin stumbled upon a great way of summarising your entrepreneurial efforts by using 11850. Read Robin’s blog post for the full details.

I had to give it a go so I texted 11850 with the question:

Hello, What is eWrite lite?

Received an answer a couple of minutes later for the cost of a text:

We found that eWrite Lite is a software that allows you to keep your website updated from any location at any time. Thank you.

Sounds good to me. Robin suspects they use Google and I think he’s right. I received the text at 11:09pm and I checked my website traffic around that time.

At 11:07pm a person used Google.co.uk to search for ‘eWrite Lite’.  They viewed our homepage and the contact details page too. Maybe they were anticipating a follow up text from me asking for a telephone number.  The user was using Windows XP and Firefox version 2.0.0.14.

A cool and easy to do experiment, Thanks Robin! And Thanks 11850!

Last night I spent the last few hours leading up to the Seedcamp deadline tweaking my application and finally submitted it at 11:41pm.

Last Thursday a few of us got together in Oriel house in Ballincollig to see if we could assist each other in our applications. At first I was disappointed with the turn out of only 4 people. Lesson learned, going to make sure I have numbers before I organise anything again.

I got great value out of that morning though. Thank you very much to Conor O’Neill, Phoebe Bright and Dara Burke for being there to chat about ideas and for practical tips. We created documents and shared them using Google Docs to virtually look over each others shoulders and offer suggestions where we could. I think I received (needed?) the most suggestions. Thanks again to Conor, Phoebe and Dara for your suggestions on the application form.

Also, Thank you to Robin Blandford. I think he was the only one to put his own answers to the Seedcamp application on his blog to get some feedback from his readers. Robin also allowed me to print out his answers to use last Thursday as a guide. Thanks Robin and the very best of luck with your application for Decisions for Heroes!

Roll on the 25th…