Evolution: A Weblog by Third North Creative

Occasionally I’ll write a little bit about the progress of our company in terms recent sales numbers. With Puck Systems currently being our primary product, we look forward to each spring as the start of a new sales season. Traditionally the summer and fall months are very good, while the winter months slow down as associations and districts concentrate on the season at hand. With board turnover and annual meetings happening, April typically is not the ideal month for earning new clients. However, this year April brought a host of new customers our way. We added 15 new associations to the Puck Systems product line last month and early May shows signs of being very strong as well. A couple of Distrcit websites were also added; its great to see those leadership boards taking advantage of that products’s capability.

Its hard to say exactly what makes one month better than another. As Malcolm Gladwell explained in The Tipping Point, any number of factors can contribute to an epidemic or in this case, simply a solid start to the sales season. In most instances its not one event or even two, its a combination of factors that raise the public’s awareness, increase the stickiness of your product, and strengthen the number of connectors and mavens that are aware of your situation. In our case specifically, the steady increase in sales and interest is most likely due to our past print advertising, concious branding effort, recent trade show appearances, improvements to the product, the complete launch of our Online Registration Module, search engine listings, a slight change in pricing structure, and the public’s increasing acceptance of technology.

In any case, its fun to see the interest level continue to rise, especially considering the majority of V2 enhancments have not yet been released. On that topic….keep an eye out for future updates on the progress of those additional features. In the meantime, take a look the new University of Minnesota Goal Line Club website we recently completed. The website build gave us an opportunity to use a number of the same tools that will be added to Puck Systems this spring and summer. Take a special look at the Photo Gallery Tool which we’ll describe in detail in another post.

Periodically I’ll be posting updates on the progress of the Puck Systems Version 2 updates. These updates will be aimed at Association Webmasters, Board Members and anybody else who is interested in the progress of the product. For those who are new Puck Systems clients, or may not be aware of Version 2…. here is a quick overview:Over the last year, we’ve received many helpful suggestions on how to improve and enhance the Puck Systems product. We’ve taken all of those suggestions into account and have chosen to build in the most popular ones.

The addition of these features to Puck Systems is being referred to as V2 or Version 2. For V2, these are some of the features that we are adding: Drag and Drop capability for items in a list (board members, forms, newsletters etc..), Improved Photo Galleries, Wider Physical Website Structure, Text Editors on all Text Boxes, and a Custom Page Builder Tool. Beyond V2 we will also be making additional improvements throughout the summer and early fall. Improved Statistic Tracking and a Multiple Scheduler Compiler are a couple examples.

So, be sure to check back or subscribe to this feed to keep tabs on the new features and their expected release dates. If you’d like to subscribe to the RSS feed, but don’t yet have a news aggregator, you can click here to see a list of popular readers. In the future we will post screen shots and even short demo videos of the new features to help you understand exactly how they’ll work.