SiteAdvisor Giving Wrong Advice

A couple of days ago Scouta’s good friend The Rooster pointed out that Scouta’s domain was flagged yellow by McAfee SiteAdvisor. It claims it has a misleading site name, “Our analysis indicates that this site’s primary purpose is to capture traffic meant for scout.com, a more popular site with a similar name.”

Of course this is completely wrong, and we’re also pretty confident that the domain has no previous owners (though that’s hard to guarantee), that might have used the site for that purpose.

So I registered for a SiteAdvisor account, and have made a Web Site Owner Comment, and await McAfee to reassess the website.

Anyone have any ideas how I can speed the process up of correcting this error?

Marketing a Web App

One company we here at Scouta constantly watch is Carson Systems and all their affiliated work. They have some great examples of clever web apps, and their Workshops bring together some of the best minds in the space.

Today Ryan posted a great blog entry that we consider key to growing a good web app: Do you need to spend money on advertising your web app?

There seems to be a big misconception amongst many Internet start-ups that you don’t need to spend money on marketing your application to be successful. As an example, check out step 8 in this list. So Ryan’s point is that you need to budget for marketing in the mix.

Now I have a confession to make, I have a marketing degree. I’ve also used the Internet for over 10 years. So I know that marketing works, but it can be a little different online. I also know that being successful doesn’t come overnight, and takes some marketing muscle. That’s not to say that we’ll have plenty of cash to spend on it, but we’ll be focusing on as many clever ways as we can to help grow the business.

Using

I sat down with my wife last night. I wanted to see how she handled the Scouta “alpha.”

We think that usability is one of the major keys to web services (another important factor is usefulness), and so we want to try and ensure that the service is very straightforward, and as self explanatory as possible. In some respects that’s easy–like ensuring that we have descriptions that help the member–but in others it’s a lot more complex. Making things work seamlessly is an art, one that Apple handles well, and Microsoft doesn’t.

So I learnt some painful, but very useful lessons, last night. We’re going to spend a few days tweaking usability, and then go in for another round of testing.