• improving ads to get more qualified clicks, and
• improving conversions once visitors reach their site

Improving your conversion rate is a process. You need to study best practices, look at other successful sites, but above all do a lot of AB testing. This includes AB testing your landing pages, call to action, and even your forms.

With Caspio Bridge creating and tweaking web forms is simple. You can try different ideas with forms and play with wording of labels and questions, form length, colors, layout, styles, buttons and graphics.

Next is managing your leads but you don’t need to invest large amounts on a fancy CRM systems. While I cannot divulge names, a Fortune-500 company has recently dropped the leading on-demand CRM provider in favor of a custom Caspio-powered solution primarily because they found that the dizzying array of tabs, links and buttons in that CRM system were distracting their sales staff. Now all the clutter is eliminated in a custom solution built with Caspio. And since Caspio pricing is not based on seats, the saving is very attractive.

Every Caspio Bridge account comes pre-loaded with a basic lead generation form and management app. While it is for demonstration purposes only, many use it as the foundation of their own custom CRM solution.

Don’t forget that Caspio’s Solution Advisors are at hand to consult with you and help you get the most out of your advertising and IT budget.

“One week ago we held our first “get acquainted meeting” with Caspio and came away impressed with the ease of service and terrific content possibilities. We then went through two training sessions and began gathering data. Today, one week later, we launched the wltx.com Data Center with 11 Caspio-powered searchable databases. The response from the public has been overwhelming and we can’t wait to build out more. Thanks to the entire Caspio team for making this seemingly overwhelming task, a piece of cake.”

Rich O’Dell
President & General Manger
WLTX-TV CBS Channel 19
Columbia, South Carolina
http://www.wltx.com/datacenter/

Those days are over now. The Caspio team is thrilled to release the latest version of Bridge which is fully compatible with Firefox on Windows, Mac and Linux and if it wasn’t for the shifting sands that the current Safari beta is, Caspio Bridge would have been compatible with Safari as well.

The Caspio Bridge administrative interface is decidedly one of the most sophisticated AJAX applications ever built and making it compatible across all major browsers required significant determination. We hope you enjoy this new flexibility as much as we do.

In 2007 we made three major releases. Each release was packed with much new functionality. Among them was the concept of parameters which glue Caspio Bridge apps together or connect Caspio Bridge apps with other apps. Parameters provided many new possibilities for our users. Instant app localization and extensive data formatting plus new data presentation options were other highlights of these releases. We also developed and implemented innovative back-end infrastructure technology that allows us to scale Caspio Bridge enormously. It enables us operate a distributed grid of Caspio Bridge nodes. We are very excited about the potentials of this new infrastructure.

Almost all of our production servers were replaced with new and we upgraded our databases to Microsoft SQL Server 2005. In the future releases we begin utilizing some of the enhancements provided in SQL Sever 2005.

Early in 2007 we formed a new business unit to focus entirely on the needs of the online media organization, primarily newspaper and TV web sites. A year later, Caspio has become the de facto standard in this industry and we now serve hundreds of leading newspaper and TV web sites. We will continue to invest in innovations and solutions that will make our online media customers more successful.

Our revenues grew by over 130%. We expanded our team and moved to new headquarters in Mountain View, California.

We also learned valuable lessons from the decisions that didn’t quite work out the way we intended them. For example the idea of opening a support center in Scottsdale, Arizona seemed to be a good one, however challenges in managing the remote office turned out to outweigh most of its benefits. After about eight months we shut down the office and stopped the distraction.

In future posts I will share with you our plans for 2008. I can say this now that we are preparing for large scale growth. We have already prepared additional office space for housing new team members. We are also working on some fantastic new features that are bound to get you excited. The Caspio team is just warming up!

If you missed it on TV, check it out here.

Caspio provides the fastest and easiest way to transform Access applications into web-based applications:

• The Caspio Bridge user interface is designed to be familiar to Access users.
• Access data can be imported directly into Caspio Bridge.
• Caspio’s wizards for creating DataPages (i.e. web forms, searchable databases and other components for web sites) are designed to be easy to follow and intuitive.
• Caspio’s plugin for Microsoft Office can keep a local Access database in synch with your online Caspio account.

Most importantly, Caspio’s Solution Advisors are very familiar with Access-to-web migrations and are ready to provide assistance and consultation.

Consultants specialized in Microsoft Access solutions find Caspio a powerful complementary addition to their toolbox.

The 100% AJAX web-based user interface of Caspio Bridge is designed to be intuitive for Microsoft Access users.

Graphic designers, advertising agencies and public relations firms use Caspio solutions to provide value-added services to their clients and complement their core services. Caspio gives them the simplicity and cost-effectiveness that was never available. Typical scenarios include:

• Bid on entire projects rather than just the design aspects.
• Enhance core offering such as ad agencies who now bundle lead generation into creative design services.
• Profit from signing large and complex projects and outsourcing them to Caspio’s quick and cost-effective Professional Services.

Developers on the other hand have realized that with Caspio they can expand their business without adding new headcounts or incur additional costs. They benefit from their relationship with Caspio in several ways:

• As a new tool in their toolbox that is applied to relevant projects.
• An easy way to increase business volume by building apps faster than before.
• Deploy Caspio’s ready-made solutions to their clients to generate recurring revenues.
• Create “application templates” that can be easily customized and deployed again and again for new customers.

We are expanding our programs for consultants in the coming months with services designed to help them succeed with less effort. However, the time to expand your consulting business with Caspio is now. Information about Caspio’s current programs can be found at http://www.caspio.com/partners/.

Sr. Reporter Ryan Konig (right) of The Arizona Republic, which was the host of the IRE 2007 Conference in Phoenix.

The public counts on newspapers for local data and online media sites are increasingly using Caspio Bridge as an easy and cost effective way of building searchable databases.

Provided that you have a semi-interesting set of data, the design of your DataPage directly affects its ability to generate page views. Consider the following techniques to maximize traffic:

1. Don’t make me think
Long and complex search forms are a kiss of death. They intimidate me. They may be great for research, to find a single record in a massive database, but a fun and interactive “consumer” database should have a simple search form. I don’t have a lot of time or energy to learn a new interface. Make it easy for me.

2. My hand stays on my mouse
Limit your search forms to clickable controls like dropdowns and checkboxes. If you want me to have fun with your database and try different searches again and again, don’t make me work hard. Don’t force me to take my hand off of my mouse and type in some words in a text field. Besides, I could be tired or spelling-challenged, which ruins the whole search.

3. I can’t drink from a fire hose
Don’t dump your entire database on me. That’s no fun for me. Give me my search results in small doses, like 20 or 25 records at a time. Let me discover more by paging through your database. Remember, every new page is an opportunity to show me more ads.

4. Engage me!
Show me just enough to make me want more. Then take me to the detail page of your record for the whole story. If you show me all you have in the search results page, I have no reason to dig deeper. Also, don’t expect me to know where to click. Make it clear.

5. Design sells
Just because it’s a database it doesn’t have to look like one. Give your data a nice layout and color scheme and add interactivity with integrated maps, reader feedback, and rating.

6. Make me look smart
Give me an easy way to send the address of this page to my friends and family. Show me how to bookmark this page and alert me when you update this database or bring another one online.

Benchmark your current performance so you can measure the results you get by applying these techniques. Everything mentioned here is easily possible with Caspio Bridge. If not sure how, ask our friendly solution advisors.

With its extremely wide reach in search, Google’s app offering is bound to have a lot of users.

But is it going to win you and I? I doubt it. For one, I do my computer use on my office desktop, home desktop, or on my laptop. I have Microsoft Office on all these machines and I depend on Office’s performance and richness. If you take Microsoft Office away from me, I simply go for the free and powerful Star Office. Version 8 is really nice. In fact I’m tempted to go for it anyway.

Despite what Google says about the penetration of its apps in small businesses, they are targeting the MySpace generation. The generation who’s main computing device is a mobile phone.

You don’t need Microsoft Office for word processing on a phone. Google Apps fit the bill perfectly. Overtime the same users are going to take Google apps to the workplace.

Microsoft, being an excellent follower these days, will surely come up with a similar offering soon. The question is will the market go with the leader or the follower?