As you know many things do not go according to the plan. In this case the main thing did not go according to the plan and this is the product idea. As I said in the previous post I had envisioned it as a way to extract useful information (email, phone, fax, etc) from unstructured data (internet, email, etc). It turns out that the majority of the customers for this kind of products are SPAM companies, that is companies that send SPAM emails. Associating the first product of my mISV with SPAM is not such a good idea, so I decided to change the product. This is one of the biggest advantages of being a mISV: you can react quickly to change. No need for long meetings end endless discussions.

But what product I’m going to built? I will stick to the October 1st, 2008 release date so it must have the same attributes as the first one. For this reason I decided to stay in the same area, but a different product. It will be called “Tollkuci Website Analyzer” and a you can guess will analyze a website and offer advice for problems and improvements that can be made. Until now I have decided on a few things:

• It will be a web product, so users can directly check their website, without downloading anything.
• It will not analyze a single page, but the full website while allowing the users to limit the scope.
• It will be free for a limited number of pages, perhaps 100 pages.
• For big websites the result can take a considerable amount of time. So the users will submit the site and receive an email when the analysis is finished.

I’m still in the process of defining the actual features it will have, but for a overall idea they fall into these categories:

• General - broken links, missing titles, html & css standards, etc
• SEO - meta keywords, meta description, Google page rank, use of keywords in page content, etc.
• Performance - gzip compression, number of images, total page size, time to first byte, time to load, etc.
• Security - NoBot protection for forms, possibility of SQL injection attacks, etc
• ASP.NET specific - usage of output cashing, size of view state, etc.

Of course for the first verson only a few of these will be implemented, but I’m thinking to focus on ASP.NET specific features. Also I’m planning that for each problem reported there will be a thorough explanation of how it can be solved and also the possibility to offer consulting to the users through email, phone, remote access, etc.

Once I’ll finalise the list of features for the first version I’ll write my next article, so keep visiting