In part one of this two part series we walked you through writing a script and recording the video for your screencast. In this final installment, we’ll talk about recording the audio, adding effects and doing the final mixdown.

But first, you face a fork in the road, a choice which will determine not only your fate, but that of all mankind: Do you do the narration in-house, or do you hire it out?

Having a pro do your voiceover:

Having a voice talent record your 1-2 minute narration should run you anywhere from $200 to $500. It’s an attractive deal. You don’t need to buy any gear. You don’t have to spend hours setting up, or do 100 takes yourself, or … you get the idea.

Martin Bromley, maker of EnergyLens - A building energy management application, has tried doing it himself and decided it’s not worth it.

More likely I’m going to try outsourcing the audio recording to someone else (using a script that I’ll write). I don’t think I have a voice made for recording, and it requires just too many takes and too much editing to use my voice to get a recording that I’m happy with!

Martin Bromley

If you’re interested in going this route, there are plenty of places where you can hire voice talent. Check out www.voicetalentnow.com and www.procommvoiceovers.com for starters.

Doing the voiceover in-house:

This is the method we chose, since we already had all of the necessary equipment, and we want to do a series of training screencasts in the future.

If you go this route, you’ll soon learn one important lesson. Everyone hates the way their voice sounds on tape. God knows I do.

But chances are it’s not *that* bad. You may never be Povaratti, but you don’t need to be. There’s nothing that says a narrator can’t sound like a normal human being.

Recording the audio:

This can be the most gear-intense aspect of the whole production. So I’ll forgive you if you want to go over to musician’s friend and geek out a little.

You have three options

• $30: The skype headset. Personally, I wouldn’t use this for a sales video, but for something that can be less polished, it’ll do.
• $120: Get a decent usb condenser microphone like the “snowball”. The audio will sound good and you won’t need to buy much else. If I was starting from scratch, this would be my choice.
• $300: The “semi-pro” setup includes a good home-studio condenser microphone, a mixing board with phantom power, and a USB audio input. I went this route, just because I happened to already have all of that equipment.

But - you may ask - does it really matter? Does the $300 setup really give you better sound than the $30? Well, don’t take my word. Listen to a demonstration. Headphones are suggested.

Make a working copy of your video

The first thing you need to do is to export your screencast to an AVI or WMF file that you can watch as you record the audio. We do this because camtasia’s preview mode doesn’t always play the video at the right speed.

Where to record?

Robert Smith from BlueBerry Software (makers of the Flashback screencasting software) gave use these tips:

A good room is the most important thing. Try and record first and test the playback. If it sound very hollow, then your room is not ‘dry’ enough and it will always sound home recorded. If you can, choose a room with lots of soft furnishings, close the curtains, shut all doors and see if you then get a nice dry sound, Also, buy as good a microphone as you can. A professional microphone like the Shure SM58 will probably require a booster or a mixer to work properly in a PC, so rather than go to that level of complexity, buy the best headset you can afford. $40 will probably get you a fairly decent one to be able to deliver reasonable quality speech.

Robert Smith

Now set up your recording equipment. You probably won’t have a recoding studio handy. But with a little ingenuity, you can get decent results on your own. Walk in closets are great, because they generally are small, windowless, and have good sound dampening properties.

Paul Young, from Skybound Software, suggests recording your audio inside a car!

Here’s a gem: Setup a laptop and do your recordings in a car! Really.
Because of the mandatory sound deafening material that is built into all
cars, anything recorded inside them tends to sound like it was done in a
high-end recording studio.


Paul Young

Make sure you use a pop filter

You will need a pop filter. A pop filter is a little barrier of shear fabric that you place in front of the microphone to prevent “P” sounds from sounding like and explosion. If you don’t have one, you can make one by bending a wire coathanger into a circile, and stretching pantyhose over it. It’s not pretty, but it works.

If I record it myself I’m definitely going to get a better
microphone and pop-filter.

Martin Bromley

Do a sound check

If using mixers, or any other audio equipment that needs power, make sure you plug everything in to the same outlet. Otherwise you could wind up with a background hum caused by the voltage drop.

Start Recording!

Q: Are there any tips you have to make the narration go smoothly?
A: The 6 p’s Perfect Practice Prevents Piss Poor Performance

Robert Smith

Do a few takes, watching the video while you speak.

Stand up while you’re speaking. It’s a simple but effective way to improve your breathing, and help you project your voice.

It’s best to record everything in one shot. But if you find that to be too hard, focus on the phrases in your narration. Try to get each phrase right at least once. Then you can stitch them together during the editing process.

For multiple takes, make sure that you keep your mouth in the same position relative to the microphone, otherwise you’ll wind up with obvious differences, which will make it hard to splice.

Clean up the audio

When you’re happy with your recording, it’s time to get rid of any background noise that may have filtered through. I’ve made a little example, so you can see the results. Listen to it with headphones. You may be surprised.

Finally, save the file in a lossless format, like WAV. If you recorded at 24 or 32 bits, be sure to downsample the file to 16 bits, otherwise your screencast software may not import it.

Also, be sure to uncheck dithering. Dithering introduces noise to make the conversion better from 32 to 16 bits. Maybe this helps for music, but for voice recordings, it just makes them sound staticy.

Import the audio

Now we import the audio into Camtasia. I imported it into audio track 2 and deleted the original audio track one.

If you’re timing wasn’t exactly right, you can split the audio up into chunks, to reposition them.

Edit the video.

So now that we have both video and audio, it’s time to add effects.

Modern screencasting software gives us lots of ways to add punch to our screencasts, once they’ve been recorded.

Let’s step through:

Custom callouts:

Most screencasts have some kind of graphic overlay at the beginning or end. The simplest way to do this is to use your screencast software’s callout title, or caption feature. But for some reason they seem to not render the fonts as well as, say, PhotoShop.

So I created a beginning and ending graphic. Then imported them as custom callouts. Just give them a little transparency, and add to the beginning and end and we’re done.

Tip: If you’re using flash, you can make the callout clickable, to link to -say - your signup page.

The other problem I had was working out how to add a download link at the
end of the video. There didn’t seem to be any obvious way to do this in
Camtasia Studio. It turns out it’s dead easy. Thanks to advice from Simon
Shutter on the BoS forum, you first add the link text or graphic to your
video and then add a callout of type ‘transparent hotspot’, positioning it
over the area you want to be able to click. Then in the flash hotspot
properties of the callout you can choose to ‘Jump to a URL’.


Mark Gladding

Zooms:

If you followed the instructions in the previous article and recorded your screencast at 2x the final screen size, There will undoubtedly be places where the viewer needs an up-close view of your application.

You can use the zoom and pan feature of camtasia to show only the area of interest and block out the rest.

Highlight:

The highlight callout is great if you need to show the user what you’re talking about. Be careful about adding too many, however. It can get confusing.

Some presenters also forget about their screencast tool’s highlight effect and instead choose to whizz the mouse around in circles, this just looks odd.

Ian Osvald

Transitions:

If you have multiple video clips, it can be jarring to move suddenly between them. So your screencasting software should let you add transition effects. In fact, most of them give you way too many. A simple fade is all you need.

Here are a few tips:

Don’t be afraid to cut out footage that seems to be too slow. When you’re waiting for your application to respond, or when you’re typing.

If you need to insert some extra footage to give you time to finish your narration, you can have the video pause on a certain frame, while you catch up. If the screen was already static, your viewers won’t even notice a difference.

Do the final encoding

Now that you’ve assembled your video, you need to do the final export. The easiest way for most people to view your site will be with a flash video. Whatever software you choose should be able to create all of the files you need for the flash video.

Use FLV format:

I learned this one the hard way. The exact same screencast rendered to FLV format was half the size of the SWF version.

In order to maintain the quality of your voice track, make sure that the sample rate is the same as it was in the original file.

The difference in quality between 44kHz and 16kHz audio is huge. Listen to these samples and see for yourself.

I kept the video quality at its maximum setting, since I didn’t want my text being garbled.

Add the video to your website and set up tracking, and you’re done.

Photo by Irene Fertik of Jon Postel, inventor of DNS.

In our first article, we discussed at a high level how to go about planning for an outage and how you can ensure that your customers can continue to access your web site. This article starts our review of all of the key components of a modern online infrastructure at the lowest layer, domain names and DNS.

Domain names and DNS provide the foundation upon which all of the other pieces of your web infrastructure are built.  Together, they allow for the use of easy-to-remember names, such as www.joltmagazine.com to access servers without having to remember an IP address such as 67.18.186.141.  While not the most exciting part of your infrastructure, the DNS layer is a very useful tool in dealing with outages higher up in the stack of technology, so it’s critical to ensure that your domain names and DNS are setup correctly and protected.

Make sure your name stays yours

The technology behind domain name registrations is fairly simple, not having changed all that much in the past ten years.  The major changes came about when the domain name market was opened up to any number of ICANN-approved registrars.  There are now hundreds of registrars that you can use for your domain name (see the ICANN website for a complete list).

From a technical perspective there’s not that much difference between registrars - the main service your registrar provides is to map from your domain name to the authoritative DNS servers that provide resolution for your name, which is not that difficult to handle.  So your choice really boils down to the stability and longevity of your registrar.  You don’t make updates to your domain name often, but you want to make sure that your registrar is still there when you need them and that your name remains yours.  You also want to make sure that your registrar provides you a good control panel for managing this mapping - it should be something you can manage directly, and not have to go through a support representative in order to make changes.

Once you have your domain name, make sure to do the following:

• Register domains for an extended period of time. Domains can be registered for up to 10 years, although most people just register for a year and then renew annually.  This runs the risk of the renewal failing for one reason or another, at which point you potentially could lose your domain.  There are mechanisms in place to try to prevent this, but they aren’t foolproof, and domain name speculators have systems to automatically snatch expiring names as they become available.Even companies as big as Microsoft have lost their domain names, so the risk is definitely real.  These sort of situations can usually be resolved in the long run, but involves lots of time and most likely lawyers.  Save yourself the hassle, and renew your domain name for many years now.  Long registrations also are rumored to help with SEO, which is an added bonus.
• Keep a master list of your domains. Over time, you’ll likely accumulate more domain names as you register names with alternate TLDs, for new products, or just speculative names that you might use someday.  Make sure you have a master list of all of your domains as it’s easy to lose track of them, especially if you use multiple registrars.  Most of the time you’ll get a renewal notice via email as domains come up for expiration, but those can get caught in spam filters or otherwise lost.
• Setup automatic renewal and keep your contact information updated. Even if you register your domain name for a long time, it will expire eventually.  Keep your registrar updated with your latest contact and billing information, and set things up so that they automatically renew domains as they expire.
• Lock your domain names. The opening of the domain registration system introduced the process for transferring names between registrars.  Transfers are initiated by the gaining registrar, and can be initiated by unscrupulous people that want to try to take a domain name.  Again, there are processes in place to prevent abuse of this, but the best solution is to lock your domain names so that they must be explicitly unlocked by the domain owner before any transfer or deletion can take place.  Many registrars do this automatically, but if you are in doubt, contact your registrar to make sure your names are locked.

Keep traffic flowing to your servers

Once you have a domain name, you need to setup DNS in order to route requests to the server(s) that are providing web, email and other services for your domain.  This is handled by the authoritative DNS servers for your domain, which are one of the most important tools you have to deal with outages, as they let you direct traffic to an alternate server, either in the same datacenter or on another continent.  A complete outage of your DNS servers means that no one on the Internet is able to find you, so it’s worth spending some time to make sure things are setup correctly.

• Make sure your DNS servers are physically distributed. Because of the importance of DNS, every domain is required to have at least two authoritative DNS servers.  These servers should be distributed, both from a network and geographic perspective, so that a major failure in one location does not take your site offline.  Some hosts will put both DNS servers on the same network segment (which you can tell by them having IP addresses that are very similar to each other), or even worse on the same physical machine.  If you’re unsure where your DNS servers are located, you can check them with tools such as TraceMyIP.
• Keep TTLs low. Each DNS record has a Time To Live (TTL) setting that indicates how long the IP address information should be cached by the computers that request it.  The TTL is expressed in seconds, and prevents your visitors from having to do a DNS lookup for every web page they request while also giving you some control over how long addresses are cached.  I say some control as there are some clients and networks that don’t properly cache.  This causes some problems when relying on DNS for failover, but still this is a useful tool.Many hosting providers default to lengthy TTLs, often four and sometimes as much as 24 hours.  This means that if you make a change to your DNS settings, some people won’t see the change for up to an entire day.  It’s important to keep your TTLs low, around 5 minutes, so that you can make changes and have them take affect quickly.
• Make sure your DNS provider performs real time updates. Some DNS servers, in particular some running the BIND DNS server, only periodically reload the configuration of their DNS records.  If your DNS provider uses this setup and only updates every 4, 8 or 12 hours, a low TTL doesn’t help you at all as you’ll still be waiting for the authoritative DNS server to update.  Most modern DNS servers handle real time updates - make sure that your provider can support this.

There are DNS hosting services, such as DynDNS and TZO, that provide hosted DNS services using a globally distributed network of DNS servers with low TTLs and real time updates.  If the default DNS servers your provider offers aren’t up to par, for a few dollars per month you can ensure that your DNS infrastructure is solid.  Some of these providers also provide automatic failover capabilities, where they will automatically start directing traffic to your backup server if they see a failure in your primary server.  We’ll discuss this more in a later article when we get to ways to keep your web servers online.

Maintaining access to your accounts

You need to ensure that you always have access to the control panels and management accounts for your domain names and DNS, as well as all of the components we’ll discuss later.  You should keep the access information (both usernames and passwords) somewhere secure yet accessible, so you can find them quickly when you really need them.

Given the number of passwords we need to manage these days, many people just use the “forgot my password” links whenever they need to login to a service.  While this may work in day-to-day use, it’s definitely a problem when you are dealing with an outage.  First, these systems typically take some time to process your request.  More importantly they rely on you being able to receive email - which is a major problem if you’re dealing with an outage that affects your mail servers.

Save yourself lots of frustration down the road and come up with a good system for managing passwords.  Exactly how to do this is beyond the scope of this article, but a lot has been written about the subject.

Finally, and most importantly, you should keep your DNS provider and your web hosting provider separate.  Many hosts bundle these services with their hosting plans, and there’s a definite convenience that comes from having them with the same company.  However, there are also serious risks.  As long as your DNS is independent, any number of things could cause problems with your web server (ranging from a power loss to a billing dispute with your provider) and you can recover.  But, if you put all your eggs in one basket you’re entirely at the mercy of your provider to keep your site online.

Is all this worth the effort?

This might seem like a lot of work to do for a pretty mundane part of your online infrastructure, but this paves the way for some of the more interesting parts that come later.  In particular, the extra effort of keeping your DNS and hosting infrastructure providers separate gives you the flexibility to redirect traffic around problems, no matter what disasters strike.

Next time, we’ll move up the stack a bit and start looking at web servers.  In the meantime, share your own stories of DNS-related disasters as well as additional tips to survive them in the comments.

—-
Jason Abate is the founder of Panopta, a web-based server monitoring and recovery service. Why not give it a try?

Sweet Jesus, screencasting is a lot of work.

Well, let’s back up. There are two ways to do a screencast. The first is to buy Camtasia, hit record and babble for five minutes while desperately trying to navigate your application.

We don’t want to do that. We want to make something at least a little professional. Something that we can show customers without cringing. Something that might even make them want to try our product.

This is the first in a 2 part series that will step you through the entire screencasting process - from writing the script to the final mixdown.

But first - I’ll bet you have some questions.

How long does it take?

Longer than you could ever imagine. Seriously, though, it took me about 14 hours to make my 75-second screencast, using the procedure I’ll outline later. The real killer is just the -fumble time- of getting everything working. If I had it to do again, It would probably take 6-8 hours.

Mark Gladding, creator of the Text2Go text-to-speach software had a similar experience.

I took a full day to get my first screencast down if you include all the
time wasted trying to record audio live from my PC. I then spent several
hours mucking around getting it playing nicely on my home page. By the time
I came to do the second screencast, I’d sorted all the technical issues and
as a result it took about half the time. Screencasts take time but I think
they’re worth it (it’s a pity I don’t have the stats to prove it yet). As
my application is predominantly an audio application, it doesn’t have a main
UI that I can show off using screencasts. I’ve found the screencast to be an
ideal way of showing how my application works. It’s also allowed me to
remove a large amount of text from my homepage, giving it a much cleaner
look at the same time.

- Mark Gladding

What kind of gear do I need?

It doesn’t take a lot to do a basic screencast. Theoretically all you need are the screen capture software, and a good headset mic. But if you’re willing to spend a little more, you can get much better quality - especially in the audio.

For this tutorial, I used Camtasia for screen capture, Adobe Audition for audio recording. And a Audio Technica AT4033A concenser mic, running through a behringer EuroRack mixer and a berhinger USB audio input. You can get something similar for < $200.

Paul Young, one of the people behind the Stylizer CSS Editor, prefers Screenflow on the Mac.

Use ScreenFlow from Vara software. If your app isn’t a mac program, use
VirtualBox. If you don’t have a Mac, buy one. ScreenFlow vs. Camtasia is
like Stylizer vs. TopStyle. Well…that might be pushing it
paul young

- Paul Young

Is it worth the time?

That’s something that you’ll have to decide for yourself. All of the people I’ve spoken with were glad that they went to the trouble. The key is to have good analytics set up so that you can see what effect your screencast has on buyer behavior (we’ll get to that in part 2).

It’s really about modernizing an organization’s communication channels for the youtube era. People are very comfortable with online video now and in some cases it’s the best mode of communication.

- Sanjay Bhatia

So you’ve decided to take the plunge? Great. Let’s get started.

Start with the script.

Why, again, do you want to make a screencast?
Which feature did you want to show off?
What message do you want to convey?

Write it down.

There’s no way around it. If you try to make up your narration as you go, you’ll inevitably come off as an idiot.

There are three things you’ll learn as soon as you try your hand at scriptwriting.

• You don’t have many words to convey your idea. My experience has been that a brisk 1 minute screencast can have 100 words. That’s not many for those of us who like to run on at the mouth.
• Some things are easy to write and hard to say. I don’t know why but I just couldn’t say -important events- without sounding like either a hick or a robot.
• It can be tough to make your narration match the action. Sure, you can fix some of this in post-processing. But you’ll make it a lot easier on yourself if you plan ahead.

Some tips:

• Fire up your screencapture software and try each of your scripts. See how well your script follows the action. Watch these videos - as painful as it may be - and use them to improve.
• When writing your script, use line breaks to indicate where you should take a breath.
• Rewrite passages that are tough to say. Use easier words.
• Sometimes it can be better to have your narration be a little ahead of the action on-screen. If you say something and show it at the same time, it can be easy for the viewer to miss

Do the real screencapture

Now that you know what you’re going to say, it’s time to do the actual screencapture. Strangely enough, this is one of the easiest parts of the whole operation.

There are a few important things you need to keep in mind.

Window size:

Let’s say you need your final video to be 500×400 pixels. Chances are that your application won’t fit in such a small window.

So you’ll need to capture an area that’s some multiple of the desired size, say 1000×800. most screencapture software will give you some tools to make this job easier.

And don’t forget to account for the size of the media player.

Readability:

If you need the viewer to be able to read text in the screencast, be very careful about scaling.

Benjamin Rister, from Decimus Software (maker of Screen Mimic, a screencasting application for the Mac) has this tip:

Just don’t scale shots that depend on that kind of clarity. Do the recording at the same resolution you plan on presenting it at whenever possible, and absolutely don’t transcode the video more than once, as it’ll get worse every time.

- Benjamin Rister

The solution that I used was to “zoom” in to 100% scale on those areas of text that needed to be readable. But others find that adding using callouts is easier.

Robert Smith, from BlueBerry - the company that makes the popular Flashback screencasting application for the Mac - told us how they do it.

Our text is added via call-out boxes during editing and is pretty clear. However, you could add text with images files created in Photoshop, for example, and add these instead. That way you could control the resolution. However, nothing beats speech.
- Robert Smith

The mouse pointer:

Ian Ozsvald, a professional screencaster (ProCasts.co.uk), warns us:

Some presenters forget about their screencast tool’s highlight effect and instead choose to whizz the mouse around in circles, this just looks odd.

- Ian Ozsvald

The cursor can be extremely distracting. Keep movement to a minimum. And if you click on a text field before typing, be sure to move the cursor away from the text, to avoid obscuring it.

Also, don’t try to use the mouse pointer to highlight text. It’s really hard.

Pauses:

Don’t worry about pausing. As long as the frame remains unchanged, you can cut out any pauses later.

Plan ahead:

If you plan on adding extra callouts, text, or picture in picture effects later, make sure that you leave space for them at the appropriate moments. Otherwise, you could wind up with the callout obscuring an important part of the video.

Take a break.

Man, that was intense. Take a break.

Well, stay tuned for part 2 where we plumb the mysteries of zoom and pan, almost strangle ourselves in a cobweb of audio-cables and finally answer the eternal question that’s been keeping us all up at night: SWF or FLV.

Photo by Hans.

[ Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be posting a series of articles about the black art of screencasting.

While researching one of these articles I did an interview with professional screencaster, Ian Ozsvald. It was so good that I just couldn't bring myself to chop it up into sound-bites. So I'm damning the torpedoes and posting the interview in its entirety. - Starr Horne]

Could you tell us a little about your background?

I’ve been screencasting for over three years. Within ProCasts.co.uk I create professional screencasts for companies and provide training. I’m also the co-founder of ShowMeDo.com. ShowMeDo is a sort of YouTube for training screencasts on open-source software. The site has a monthly audience of 100,000 world-wide users and over 100 authors, there I’ve personally created over 130 screencasts ranging from Python programming to Firefox to how-to-screencast.

What sort of planning goes into a typical screencast?

To my mind the most important roles of the professional screencaster are to understand:

1. Who will watch the screencast and what they want to know (why does this tool make their life better than someone else’s?)
2. What the client wants to show (probably their main tool and unique-selling-points)
3. What the client wants to achieve (usually ‘more conversions’!)

Once you know the needs of the viewer and their background you can craft a presentation that conveys the client’s message. The client probably wants more users to sign-up and try their service or buy a license. There should be one clear message which is backed by supporting points.

If the client wants more users to sign-up to try a service, that should be the main point. The supporting points are probably demonstrations of features that make the viewer’s life easier, these all build the viewer’s confidence towards the goal ‘this is the tool for me’.

I prefer to demonstrate the tool working with live action rather than to talk over a static presentation with screenshots, seeing the tool working sticks far more strongly in the mind. It also shows the user what to expect when they try it, this gives them greater confidence and removes a barrier that might have formed in their mind.

The screencast can end with a call-to-action. All interested users will want to know what they should do next. If you point them in the right direction after they’ve given you several minutes of their attention then there’s a high chance that they’ll follow that action.

Do you have any top-secret professional tips for do-it-yourselfers?

• Use great tools - on Windows get CamTasia, on a Mac get Screenflow. For Linux you can use tools like ffmpeg or recordmydesktop to make a video but you’ll be stuck for decent screencast editors, I’d suggest exporting back to Windows or Mac for editing. You could also try using a virtual Linux instance inside Windows or a Mac.
• Try to use a good voice microphone. Built-in laptop mics won’t do. A quiet environment with a decent mic should give a good result. Pro-audio equipment will be much better. In post-production use an audio editor (Audacity is great and free) to remove breathing, compress the volume levels and remove noise. If you breathe on the mic a lot, remember to breathe separately from speaking so it is easier to remove the whooshing sounds.
• If you have strong sibilants (’esses’) then play with the microphone’s location, this usually solves the problem, angling it can be very helpful. If you have plosives (’p’s and ‘b’s), try a pop-shield.
• For the video I’d always plan the entire script. For new presenters remember that the pause key is your friend. You can cut dead scenes in post-production and pausing lets you get your breath.
• Be careful if you’re doing an off-the-cuff presentation, ‘ums’ and ‘errs’ can appear at awkward moments during key scenes and they’re harder to edit out if you’re speaking at the same time as all the sounds cut into each other.
• I aim for 2-3 minutes for a marketing demo for first-time visitors and up to 8 minutes for a tutorial when the user is prepared to watch for longer. Long videos for first-time visitors will make them bored so keep it snappy.

Most people can create a credible demo if they plan and practice, have a quiet room and a decent mic. Always get feedback from someone else before releasing the result to an unsuspecting world.

Surely you must have some horror stories. What are the worst mistakes you see from people making their own screencasts?

Some of the worse audio I’ve heard comes from cheap mics which are humming due to electrical interference. The user then knocks the microphone a few times causing loud thumps and they breathe on the mic causing constant Darth Vader-like sounds. Add in line-noise and street-noise and you’ve got a presentation which is really hard to listen to, it certainly won’t sound professional. Post-production on the audio can only treat some of this, a good mic in a quiet room is always to be preferred.

With video I’ve seen people choose not to use audio (because they didn’t like their voice) and to compensate they’ve used a number of visual fade effects and unhelpful annotations.

Rather than using 1 or 2 short fades, they’ve used a set of the whizziest ones for 5+ seconds each. This produces an inconsistent result with unhelpful graphical effects. Unhelpful annotations might ask questions of the user which aren’t answered or present feature lists rather than showing benefits. Leaving the user *more* confused is about the worst crime you can commit with a screencast!

Some presenters also forget about their screencast tool’s highlight effect and instead choose to whizz the mouse around in circles, this just looks odd.

Anything else you’d like to add?

I choose to guarantee my work. If it doesn’t achieve the desired action (e.g. increasing conversions) then I’ve not done my job and I don’t deserve my fee. Generally speaking, multiple screencasts get a discount compared to just one as less time is required overall, complex demos with polished graphics take more time and cost more than simple walkthroughs. I’m always happy to give feedback on how and why screencasting might benefit a site and help increase conversions.

—

If you’re looking for some outside help in planning or creating your screencast, I highly recommend that you get in touch with Ian. You can reach him at ian@procasts.co.uk .

Or…

Check out Ian’s professional screencasts

See over 130 tutorials by Ian at ShowMeDo

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Anyone who runs a small software company or online service knows the importance of a strong web presence.  A lot has been written about how you should structure your site, what message you should present to visitors, and what you can do to increase your conversion rate and ultimately drive revenue.  However, all of these assume that your website is up and running and that visitors can actually reach your site.

If you’ve worked with technology for any time at all, you know that Murphy’s Law is alive and well, and that things can and will break.  I’ve spent the past ten years in the hosting industry, the first eight years running the technology side of a major hosting company.  In that time, I saw the ins and outs of the infrastructure that makes up the Internet, including failures of every imaginable sort.  For the past two years I’ve run my own startup, Panopta, which provides advanced server monitoring and outage management tools.  My goal with this series of articles is to share what I’ve learned with other startups and software companies, and hopefully save you some pain and stress down the road.

Perhaps you’re just starting out designing your online presence, and are looking for ideas on how to design your infrastructure.  This is the best time to think carefully about how to avoid problems down the road.  If you already have an online presence, don’t worry, these strategies can be incorporated as incremental improvements to existing infrastructure and there’s no better time than the present to begin preparations.

Given the number of components that come together to provide the full infrastructure needed to host a website, from the physical (datacenter building, electricity, air conditioning), network (backbone connectivity, global routing tables, intra-datacenter networking) and software (operating system, web server, application server, etc.) there’s plenty that can go wrong.  Outages can be the result of good events too - everyone has heard stories of sites that have been knocked offline by a front page mention on Digg or Slashdot.  Great exposure but it’s wasted if visitors can’t actually reach your content.  This goes double for software-as-a-service companies, as an outage not only means potential customers can’t find you but that current customers are unable to use the service that they are paying for.

This is the first in a series of articles that will explore what you can do to maximize the availability of your website and other components that make up your online presence so that your current and future customers can always find you.

Where to Start?

Before getting involved with technical details, there are some general principles that should guide the design of your infrastructure.  These really transcend any particular technology that you’re using, but should be kept in mind both when initially putting together your infrastructure and at each step in it’s evolution.

Take responsibility for your own infrastructure

Unless you’re launching a huge VC-funded operation, you’ll likely involve a number of service providers in building your infrastructure.  We’ll talk later about how to pick these wisely, but it’s important to recognize that the availability of your infrastructure is ultimately your responsibility.

While you can (and should) count on your providers to assist when there are problems, their interest can never be 100% aligned with yours as they are also responsible to many other customers.  Many people think that they are safe because they have a service level agreement (SLA) but most SLAs only provide compensation for the cost of the service, not your business losses, during the downtime.  For any sizable outage, your business losses will likely be the far greater of the two.

At the end of the day, you’re the one that suffers most from an outage — take the lead and do whatever makes sense to minimize the impact.

Know what can break

There are quite a few moving parts to even the simplest online presence, most all of which are under your control.  It’s important to know what all of these pieces are, how they interact, and what their dependencies are.   Then, while you are in a calm, non-crisis situation, try to imagine all of the possible things that can break.  In later articles, we’ll walk through the core components together and review common areas to focus on, but especially with custom applications there are lots of areas that will be unique to your setup.

As we describe below, we don’t necessarily need solutions to all of these, but we want to make sure we’re not surprised down the road with something unexpected.

Minimize the impact of outages

The worst feeling that you can have when something breaks is to find that you’re stuck and unable to act to resolve the problem.  To avoid this, dream up solutions to all ways that things can break.  This would involve building and maintaining additional infrastructure, such as deploying redundant systems, ensuring you have proper backups of critical data, and spreading your services around to different providers.  Again, we’ll cover these in detail as we work our way through the key pieces of your infrastructure.  There is additional cost of this extra infrastructure, but it can pay off dearly when you start to have problems by keeping your options openand giving you more choices in how to respond to a particular situation.

Without this, you might find that the only copy of important data sits on a server in a blacked-out datacenter or will take hours to restore from backup.  Or that you are unable to direct traffic to another server because you can’t access your DNS servers.  The resulting frustration can take years off your life.  If you design things carefully, you can keep the pain and stress to a minimum and ensure that an outage of one component doesn’t take you entirely offline.

Match your efforts to your acceptable level of risk

It’s impossible to avoid every possible outage, but that doesn’t mean that it makes sense to prepare for all of them regardless of their likelihood.  Especially for small businesses, it’s important to evaluate the possible risks to your infrastructure and their impact on your business, and then decide what it makes sense to pay (in dollars, time and complexity) to avoid each risk.  There isn’t any set of answers here that apply to all businesses, as each  business is different - you have to make intelligent choices about what risks to prepare for and incorporate those into your plan,

Plan your response

The worst time to think about how things should function is after something has broken - the stress and pressure of lost revenue and unhappy customers makes dealing with an outage even harder.  Under this kind of pressure, we professional problem solvers tend to fix the immediate issues, sometimes “shooting from the hip” as we do so, often overlooking larger issues which might cause things to cascade into larger problems.

Ideally, when an outage hits you have a plan ready and just need to carry out the pre-arranged steps to take care of things.  For most companies, this doesn’t mean that you have to put together a 500-page book describing every scenario, but you should take time before a problem occurs to assess the key components that make up your infrastructure, understand how they might fail, and plan your response.

What’s Next?

So far we’ve covered the theory of how to keep your infrastructure reachable to your customers.  Fortunately, there are a number of relatively simple things that you can do make yourself more resilient.  Over the next few articles we’ll cover all the elements of your online presence, starting with domain name registration and DNS.

Without a doubt, preparing for an outage in advance certainly adds to the complexity of bringing your company online, but it greatly simplifies keeping your business online.  Remember, at the end of the day it’s your company, and no one can take better care of it than you!

—
Jason Abate is the founder and CEO of Panopta, a complete server monitoring solution. Learn more at panopta.com

Photo by JoshBerglund19.

By Bob Walsh

One of my favorite sayings is, “there’s nothing more practical than a good theory”. So what’s the theory, the economic model, the historical imperative behind the success of so many small software companies? The Long Tail.

Back in October 2004, Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, wrote a article called “The Long Tail”:

“Anderson argued that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough.” - Wikipedia.

Now I can hear you saying, “That’s nice, but what has it got to do with me?” Simply put, the Long Tail is where small companies can thrive and prosper.

Once upon a time (in the eighties)…

If you wanted to break into the software business, you needed to create a product with high demand, like an operating system, a word processor, a spreadsheet. You needed a product that everybody with personal computers (as they were called then) would buy, because there were only a few million people out there with personal computers. You had to sell to most of the market to make enough to pay the rent on you office building, bribe your way onto the shelves of stores and spend 30% of your revenues looking for customers.

That was then; this is now.

Now, we have over one billion people who use the Internet today. Now, we can if we’re relevant connect with customers anywhere in the world in four clicks. Now, everybody in the developed world has a PC. Now, If can find the one person out of every 100,000 people on the Net who has need of my software, I can make a great living; if I find 4 out of 100,000 online consumers or businesses, I can make real money.

MicroISVs are all about niches nearly all the time; but those niches add up quick. Large companies can’t compete effectively out in the Long Tail; it costs too much for them to operate.

But you can.

If you’d like to read more on this subject, here are several good places to start:

• The Long Tail of Software. Millions of Markets of Dozens.
• The Long Tail of Software.
• The Long Tail of Software. (Part 2)
• The Long Tail Squidoo Lense.

Photo by Zscreem.

If there’s one thing I’m tired of, it’s reading. It seems like everywhere you go, somebody wants you to interpret these little “characters,” to turn them into “words” and - supposedly - to “learn things” from them.

Well today, we’re throwing the verbage overboard. So sit back, relax, and learn something the new-fashioned way: with YouTube.

Eric: Marketing for Geeks

Joel: 100k per Programmer

Seth: Everything’s Broken

Guy: How to give good PowerPoint

Ze: How to be..umm..HILAROUS

Photo by Editor B.

By Bob Walsh

It has to be one of the most asked startup questions: How do I build my web site right? There’s no one right answer, but there are a number of things that if not done mean you don’t get the prize. Here are my top three to chew on:

State your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

 This is a must have. In one or two sentences, you need to spell out precisely why what you are selling is worth the readers’ money and time, in a way they understand. Your USP is not your features, it’s not even your benefits. It is why your prospective customer should spend another half-second at your site to learn your features and benefits.

Another way of saying this is, “AAA is a BBB that unlike XXX lets you do CCC [choice of adjectives], by doing DDD.” Where AAA is your product name, BBB is what kind of product or service it is, XXX is your competition (an actual product or more general “straw man”) and DDD is your primary differentiator.

State your Price

 Don’t be coy, don’t make me guess, don’t make me email you, don’t bury it. You have a solution - great. How much? Without knowing the cost, it is impossible to assess whether your solution fits me.

Show me

 I need to see, not just read, about what you are selling. Why? Because if what you are selling looks attractive, professional, reasonable, I’m prepared to go further in judging what you are selling. If on the other hand, what you’re selling does not look attractive, or isn’t there to be visually assessed, it’s game over and you have just lost the chance of a sale.

Here’s an example of the above in action from RescueTime.

• They state their Unique Selling Proposition center stage. “Ridiculously Easy Time Management & Analytics” This up front statement means if you were looking for a CRM, you’re free to move on. But if you’re interested in time management, read on.
• They back it up. RescueTime goes on to back up that USP with their top 3 benefits - Effortless Time Tracking, Beat Interruption Overload and Compare Your Productivity. Furthermore - and this is critical - they start the process of backing up what they claim right below each of these benefits. By backing up their claims immediately, they build credibility.
• They state the price. Free for the basic individual plan, then up to $120/mo. for a 30 person team.
• They show you what it looks like, and what they show looks professional, attractive and seems well suited to the problem. First, they show you just a bit of feature to back up each of their top 3 benefits; then they have two well-done tours.

You could do a lot worse than studying how RescueTime, step by step, idea by idea, presents its case to its prospective customers.

==

Disclosure: Tony Wright, founder of RescueTime, is one of my clients.

Photo by bcostin.

Why does CRM software have to suck?

The problem is that everyone means something slightly different when they say “CRM.”

Personally, I just need a quick, streamlined way to track contacts and email. I could care less about inventory, HR, or forecasting tools.

But you might have a sales force to manage. And so you need tools to track your pipeline and compare the performance of your reps (so you’ll know when to yell at them).

This article will give you a brief overview of 7 of the most popular web-based CRM packages. But that’s nothing special. You can find “comparison” reviews all over the net.

But we went one step further. We found and interviewed actual users of these applications, to give you a little perspective “from the trenches.”

Batchbook

You want a simple crm, but you need to customize it to fit your special needs.

Most of the simple CRM options limit the types of information you can store about a contact, or a task.

Suppose your company sells a blog engine. You might want to know if your customers are running your software on windows or linux .

In most simple CRM applications, you would have to add this as a “note” to the customer’s record. But you can’t run queries, or generate mailing lists from a “note” field.

Batchbook is the simple CRM with custom fields. And their implementation, called “super-tags” is extraordinarily flexable.

The concept of SuperTags is just amazing. It really expands the power and flexibility of the service. Any tag can be come a supertag. At first I was reluctant to create supertags, but once I “broke the ice” then I got excited about just what I could do with them.

Jason Shultz - The OSM Blog

Batchbook starts at $9.95/month for 3 users and unlimited contacts.

Salesforce

You need it all: reports, quotes, inventory, ad tracking. And you want to get it from a grown-up company that won’t go out of business any time soon.

We switched to Salesforce. From what we have seen, the best options are Salesforce and Zoho, but Zoho lacked one single feature important to us (Autoresponder).

Lucius Bobikiewicz - Smart Toucan

I have to admit, Salesforce.com surprised me. I’d expected it to be just another piece of enterprise bloatware, but it’s really not that bad.

It’s easy to navigate, looks decent, and is pretty responsive (compared with applications like SugarCRM). And as long as you run Outlook, it integrates with your email.

The price is reasonable – the small business edition is $9/month per seat. If you need some of the more advanced features, that can jump to $50 or $100 though.

Netsuite

You need CRM, accounting, e-commerce, and HR software. And you need it all to work together.

Netsuite must have been invented by Ron Popeil. It slices. It dices. You can essentially run your entire business using nothing but Netsuite. Of course, all of this adds up to one serious price tag.

It’s easy to use, and allows me to do everything I need to manage my business in one place.

My only complaints would be: 1) expensive, 2) more powerful than I know what to do with, and 3) a bit more complex than it needs to be.

There are so many amazing things that it does, but I just don’t know what to do with it all. I don’t have the time to sit and teach myself and I certainly don’t have the time to take any of their training courses. I hope to do so in the future however.

I wish they had a scaled-down or “lite” version that did just the things I want it to do.

Monique Stover - SeaGreen Software

Highrise

You want simple contact, task and project tracking that fits easily into to your everyday workflow.

I have a love-hate relationship with 37signals.

On the one hand – they make good software. On the other hand, their ability to amass a clone army of uncritical, raving, (and somewhat snide) fanboys is a little unsetteling.

But after so many of my friends recommend Highrise, I gave it another look.

If what you need is simple contact & task management, this is a jewel of an application. The workflow is seamless. But don’t expect hardcore CRM features any time soon.

I switched over to Highrise approximately 4 months ago and once I bcc’d all my email to it, found it as a great way to quickly get things moving and keep them (mostly) up to date.

D. Keith Casey Jr. - Casey Software

Oprius

You’re a solo operation. You want one application for email, calendaring, contact management, and sales automation.

Oprius is meant to be an online ACT! replacement. It has a decent webmail client, support for mailing lists, lead capture, and much more. But the interface is (for the most part) simple and intuitive.

I really love Oprius. That’s why it broke my heart to have to leave it. I didn’t realize until about 2 weeks in, that there is no support for multiple users, and no plans to add it.
Sadly, that was a deal-breaker for me.

Starr Horne (Your humble author) - ChatSpring

Oprius is $15 / month.

SugarCRM

You need a fully featured CRM that you can host on your own servers, and extend with custom modules.

There’s no denying it – SugarCRM does a lot. Webmail, email marketing, inventory, you name it. On a feature-by-feature basis, Sugar even beats salesforce.com.

But the features do get in the way of usability. Compared with Basecamp or Oprius, SugarCRM just seems slow and clunky.

The general movement among the entrepreneurs I spoke with, seems to be away from Sugar.

While I think SugarCRM is a great option for organizations larger than mine, for my team (me fulltime, 3-4 contractors as needed), it was a bit excessive and cumbersome.

D. Keith Casey Jr. - Casey Software

Forget about Sugar CRM. Check out their documentation an a topic such as Autoresponder and read the angry comments of long term users in the support area. On SugarCRM I even found a field in the customer database where I was not able to enter my email address as it was to long We installed it, tested it for four hours and removed it immediately.

Lucius Bobikiewicz - Smart Toucan

SugarCRM is free if you host it yourself. It’s $40/month if you use their hosted version.

BrowserCRM

You want a self-hosted CRM, with a ton of features, but a little friendlier than SugarCRM.

BrowserCRM is a commercial alternative to sugar. It’s a self-hosted, full-bore CRM. The user interface is a lot snappier, and uses YUI AJAX components to give a semi-desktop experience.

I was using BrowserCRM for a while, and was fairly impressed with it as an overall application, but I ended up going back to Highrise as my main need currently is basic sales lead tracking. BrowserCRM provides this, but with all of it’s additional features it turned out to be rather bulky to use for my purposes.

If I were looking for a full-featured CRM package, I’d probably still be using it. Compared to SugarCRM, which I’ve used a bit in the past, it seems to have similar features, and less of a learning curve.

Jason Abate - Panopta

The first 2 seats are free, but after that, it starts at around $100 per seat.

That’s All Folks

Well, that’s it. We’ve now officially covered every CRM in the world.

What’s that? Did I miss one? Let us know!