Image via WikipediaAdobe Dreamweaver is a tool used to design and develop web pages. I’ve used Dreamweaver for several versions, starting back in Version 4, when it was owned by Macromedia. Version 10 was just released to public beta yesterday.

I didn’t upgrade to the previous version (V.9) because Dreamweaver didn’t add all of the value I was wanting or needing, and as I’ve posted about before, there were some issues regarding how effective it was for me given the more complex types of web sites I have been working on. Dreamweaver for example didn’t support things like:

• JavaScript libraries and Frameworks
• Poor PHP support
• Produced Bloated Code
• No real support for version control systems

However, Version 10 seems to have added support for some of the features I’ve been wanting, including JavaScript libraries like JQuery and Prototype as well as content version control (a much needed feature for many versions). It also, from what I’ve heard, runs faster than the last couple of versions, which was desperately needed as site development was becoming slow if you had any complex CSS in the design, such as this web site.

This is where the bad experience sets in. I find the link to download the new version and I find out that I cannot use it because I don’t have the previous version (CS3/V9).

photo credit: Jay DuggerSoftware companies have been using the web to push out new products at a faster rate, which is good, but when a company requires you upgrade every 12 to 15 months, about how long Adobe puts out new versions, and pay hundreds to thousands of dollars, they need to realize that not everyone can or will upgrade, especially, if they do not give them the features they need.

Then if you block off part of your users, you risk alienating them. Because of the limitations I’ve found in some instances, I’ve already started using other tools, and might continue to based upon this latest run in with them.

So if you, want to leverage the Internet to brings products to market faster, that is good, just don’t do it at a rate which your customers can’t keep up (because of speed or time). And if you move at that rate, don’t expect everyone to upgrade every version.

Web Analytics is often used by marketing staff members to determine their effectiveness. This is a real-life example of how I recently helped a company measure the effectiveness of their internally driven e-mail campaign.

A company I work provides training to their clients on the products they have purchased, as part of their on-going support.

Before I started working with this company, only basic analytics from the website was tracked. Not even all of the pages were being actively tracked. So I have been slowly working on adding a complete view of the website usage based upon analytics.

It recently started sending out targeted e-mail newsletters showcasing their latest course offerings based upon what classes the user has previously attended. However, the first e-mails required that the user manually enter the web address, and search for the class. While enrollments improved, it wasn’t as much as had been hopped.

To make things easier, I developed a method to allow the user to directly access the class. Given that a software vendor was used for the site, which has limited customization abilities, this was not as simple as one would think. However, with my web development background it was possible. By using a special link and modifying our analytics package, we were able to start tracking how many people followed the link from the e-mails that went out.

While it was always intuitive that they received more enrollments based upon the e-mails, they had no way to determine how many people were accessed the site based upon the e-mails. They could see that on a given day, enrollments went up - but how about the following days.

Often e-mail isn’t opened or acted upon in the first day due to people being out the office, having to get approval for the expenditure, etc. We can now prove this by seeing web hits from our clients 3 or 4 days after the initial e-mail goes out.

By tracking the information a little more closely, we can see the return on investment (ROI) of the internal e-mailing system and validate its continued use. This has the staff excited about continuing to use this new marketing system, as well as bringing in additional clients for the training.