Ben Noland's Blog

Here’s two things I learned when I launched eclocking yesterday.

1. The importance of a good landing page

I had hoped that people would figure out what eclocking was all about by playing with it. This wasn’t the case. My statistics from the first day were as follows:

900 people saw the timer (that's was the front page)
358 people saw the tour or used the history page

About 60% of the visitors left before they even understood what eclocking was all about. They won’t be back.

2.  Need to focus on a niche

While building eclocking, I tried to keep it as generic as possible in order to attract a broader audience. Problem is, most people didn’t see a specific scenarios where it would be useful.

I will probably need to pick either timed athletic activities  (jogging, biking) or timed billing (lawyers, contractors).  Eclocking currently isn’t the ideal solution for either.

What now?

I’ve added a more informative front page to eclocking.com. As far as choosing a niche, I’m going to give myself some time to gather information before shifting my direction.

Today it is my pleasure to introduce the world to eclocking.com.

Eclocking is my attempt to create the ideal stopwatch. Typical stopwatches have no capacity for storing, organizing or displaying your data. What’s the point of timing something if you’re not going to keep track of it?

With eclocking, once you’ve recorded a timing, you tag it and save it. Now you can create charts, filter your data, edit your data, export it, etc. This is your data, do whatever you want with it.

Your data is stored on our  servers so it travels with you. You don’t have to mess with files or programs.

It can be a little cumbersome to carry a laptop computer with you everywhere. I’ve created a mobile web version so you can use eclocking on your phone, ipod touch or other compatible device.

Please give eclocking a try and leave me some feedback. This is just the beginning. With your help and feedback we can turn eclocking into something great!

I was given a new machine at work today.  It’s an AMD Phenom II X4 965 running at 3.41 GHz, with 4.00 GB or RAM. The operating system is Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

Here’s a list of the programs that I installed:

• firefox
• launchy
• netbeans 6.7
• python
• ipython
• java
• winmerge
• gvim
• winsplit revolution
• autohotkey
• tortoise svn
• cygwin

Some others I installed later:

• winamp