This week’s microISV volunteer for the Weekly Site Review is Nicolas Cadilhac, who’s Canadian company VisualHint since it started in October 2006 has one product out and a second in public beta.

Overview:

VisualHint’s first product is Smart PropertyGrid.Net (pricing starts at $139 USD), a highly-customizable propertygrid for developers in the .NET world. His second product, Smart FieldPackEditor.Net, is a robust alternative to the stock DateTimePicker. Overall, Nic does a decent job selling his developer-orientated products, dealing particularly well with the issue of having 2 products at one site.

ScoreBoard:

Here’s how I rank VisualHint’s site. (0 is missing, 5 is excellent.)

Area	Score	Comments
USP	2.5	Smart FieldPackEditor.Net’s is adequate, Smart PropertyGrid.Net’s USP does not.
Features/Benefits	1.5	Muddled, verbose text needs rewriting.
Visuals	4.0	The overall site’s appearance and the screencasts are very good.
Testimonials	3.0	Good testimonials, but not well used.
Credibility	3.5	Nic’s emphasis on responsiveness addresses a key concern of the market.
Tech Support	4.5	Strong support, well presented.
Blog	3.0	A good start.
Overall	3.14	A decent score, but definitely room for improvement.

USP:

(The Unique Selling Proposition is both “the hook” that keeps the prospective customer on the site and the place where you establish your initial relevance, value and connection with a given possible buyer).

Here’s what VisualHint.com’s home page looks like:

Nic’s two products each has a USP, and that works, if both USPs are strong, well-supported by credibility markers and butressed by clear, compelling benefits.

“The only PropertyGrid which is complete and flexible enough for your customers.” This USP doesn’t really work. VisualHint is selling to .NET developers – their customers are an indirect market at best. Complete enough, flexible enough, just isn’t enough. Every microISV struggles with getting enough distance between them and their product so they can look back at the product and in a few words both connect the product with a major pain their prospective customers have and differentiating them from other products. I think microISVs who sell to other developers have an even harder time of this than microISVs who sell to non-developers.

Here’s a couple stabs at an alternative USP for this product:

• Finally, a propertygrid for serious .NET developers who need a more flexible and customizable control.
• Your .NET application isn’t average. Neither should be your propertygrid control.
• End the frustration. Get Smart PropertyGrid.Net.

Two elements to consider here. First, the market for this control isn’t all .NET developers – it’s .NET developers who are frustrated by, dissatisfied with or just plain hate the propertygrid control they now use, be it Microsoft’s or some other vendor. Speak to them.

Second, unless your USP grabs their attention right away, they are not going to stick around long enough hear what else you have to say. You need to offer or assert this control is better than what they don’t like in some significant, relevant way. Finally, you want to share your customer’s pain and/or desires and let them know you understand them.

I think Nic does a much better job with his second product’s USP: “At first, there was a restrictive and defective legacy DateTimePicker. Now there is the FieldPackEditor…” This USP connects with what the prospective customer is experiencing, shares their point of view and then asserts a solution. That works.

Benefits/Features:

Again, a mixed bag here. While FieldPackEditor asserts it’s value and starts to back that up immediately with bullet points, PropertyGrid does not – it has a nice, if not particularly informative graphic.

I think a large part of the problem here is the page’s fixed, restrictive layout. Given that VisualHint is selling to developers, why use a layout that assumes a small screen? A site width of 770px is not appropriete for this market and limits your ability to tell your story.

Here’s how Nic’s site looks in IE on a modern wide screen LCD, with IE not even full screen:

I’d recommend going to a fluid layout, that has room enough for your first layer of benefits/features to be on the home page.

There is however, a deeper problem. Most of the copy for the site suffers from a strong need to have someone more fluent in English give it a good editing. Nic is French, living in Montreal, Canada and I being hopelessly monolingual marvel when anyone can communicate in more than one (human) language. But still – the prose has a very chatty feel to it and sometimes doesn’t get to where it needs to be, for example:

• A headline: “When it comes from a simple observation”
• “VisualHint is not a mega corp. and there is no latency to transform your requests and reports into actions. “
• “That’s why Smart PropertyGrid is recommended for developers who have always been hesitant to use the Microsoft PropertyGrid as well as for those who use and even master it.”

Nic has a lot of good features to talk about and those features roll up to three good benefits: PropertyGrid was built from the ground up to surpass Microsoft’s stock control, PropertyGrid is far more customizable, PropertyGrid can deliver a far better experience for your application’s users.

Unfortunately, it took me a good 30 minutes to finally find those good features – there’s a whole page of them buried way down on the Features in-depth page. I would strongly suggest a set of feature-backed benefits on the home page leading to this Features in-depth page and lose the page in between.

What does a feature-backed benefit look like? Here’s one PropertyGrid’s features, buried in the “10 Reasons to adopt SPG.NET” page:

“The Microsoft PropertyGrid forces an annoying popup on your customers when the data does not validate. Smart PropertyGrid simply gives the user options when data does not validate, where and when the opportunity to do so exists.”

The rewrite:

• “Do validation your way. The standard PropertyGrid uses an annoying and disruptive popup when the user’s data does not validate. Smart PropertyGrid let’s you as the developer give the user options of how they want to be alerted to a data error.” The first sentence is the benefit, the rest describes the feature(s) that support the benefit.

Visuals:

Good news here – VisualHint does a very good job making it’s site attractive. VisualHint has also gone the extra mile and done 4 nicely-done screencasts for Smart FieldPackEditor.Net:

(Yes, that’s a Mac screen capture of a screencast about a .NET control – humor me!) The screencasts do a very good job of selling Smart FieldPackEditor.Net – retrofitting Smart PropertyGrid.Net with a set of similar screencasts would be a very good idea.

Credibility Markers and Testimonials:

Again, VisualHint does a good job here. First off, on the home page VisualHint describes a technical partnership with another company, Skybound. Partnerships are a good thing for microISV – the credibility of your partner rubs off on you. (A very good reason in and by itself not to do your own payment processing, but I digress.)

VisualHint builds credibility further by addressing directly two major concerns when selling controls to developers: quality and vendor responsiveness. I and every developer I know have bought a control only to find it’s properties and methods are bizarre and support disappeared as soon as the transaction is processed.

One issue that I need to point out: VisualHint requires creating an account to download a trial or to purchase their products first. This is a terrible idea – you convince a prospective customer to download a trial version and wham! – they get sidetracked into having to grapple with creating an account and all the issues that the prospective customer might have with creating yet another meaningless account.

I suspect that this hurdle is an artifact of using Expression Engine as the sites CMS, but I could very easily be wrong. I would predict removing the need to create an account just to download the trial would significantly increase sales in and by itself.

VisualHint is sitting on a pile of gold when it comes to its testimonials, but again technology gets in the way: only one testimonial is displayed on the home page at the time – you have to reload the page manually to discover there are more than one testimonial there.

One other point re credibility markers: Nic’s About page is excellent for a microISV: personal, engaging and a great opportunity to connect with prospective customers.

Tech Support:

VisualHint’s strongest selling feature is the good job it does on Tech Support. The combination of making it easy to submit a request, review forum postings and read recent forum postings works well.

Nic doesn’t pretend on his support page or elsewhere that some vast legion of nameless tech support people are sitting somewhere ready to spring into action, as some control vendors do: “I am typically available Monday through Friday, 9AM-5PM East time. Expect an answer from me inside one business day.” Short, sweet and most importantly, authentic.

Blog:

Nic has a good start to his blog – and has incorporated it into his home page as a way of easily keeping the home page fresh. I’d recommend Nic blog more often, with shorter posts, and post a lot more about all the Microsoft Visual Studio shortcomings we all know and love. (Microsoft bear-baiting is a time-honored and robust sport on the Net and a sure traffic builder – and who better than a hardcore developer to know and talk about all those wonderful bugs and limitations? )

Overall:

Overall, VisualHint does a better job than most sites selling to other developers. But the site could greatly benefit by restructuring the site to make more accessible important content, editing the text to improve its clarity and punch and dropping the registration requirement for prospective customers.

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The Weekly Site Review is a regular feature of 47hats.com. Please add your comments, rebuttals and opinions. If you’d like to volunteer your microISV’s web site for a free public review, email me at bob.walsh@47hats.com. MicroISV’s only need apply!