Monday, November 2, 2009

Slow Progress and Motivation

We are slowing picking up customers and our user base continues to grow. Of course I wish we had more which would give us more resourses and enable us to expand our offering but in the real world where the banks are still closed for business all growth has to be self financed. This means we need the users before we can expand.
In an effort to convert more of our traffic to actual users we're hearing that Silverlight is a constraint for some people. Now I think Silverlight is a wonder of science and enables you to do so much more on the web. In my opinion in 2-3 years this will be the de-facto standard. But unfortunately we might be just a little ahead of the game "on the bleeding edge" as it's called.
We have decided to hedge our bets a bit. We are currently developing a slimmed down AJAX version of our content pages to allow people in restrictive environments view our content. Now the full experience will always be Silverlight and I'm willing to bet that in a couple of years this is an obsolete move but now we need to live with the technologies that people use, not what we think they should use.
So for all those users who would like to see what we can do but can't (or won't) use Silverlight we have a solution coming down the track...

5 comments:

  1. Good move. The core technologies for AJAX are far more widespread (including Linux & Mac) than the core technologies for Silverlight. I'm using the Chromium browser on Ubuntu Linux to view this page. AJAX would work nicely for me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. What a bummer though - I think secondteacher is one of the best examples on how to use silverlight without going over the top - the site is a pleasure to use. Pity secondteacher wasn't around for leaving cert '94! I stumbled across the site while researching amazon aws, and saw it was showcased. Deserves so much more "profitable" traffic.
    You are probably right in that you are a bit ahead of the game - people have no problem downloading flash... yet they shy away from silverlight... makes no sense really.
    Best of luck

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for your kind word of encouragement Colm

    ReplyDelete
  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete