While I’ve been predominately involved in marketing and social media for Edit Huddle, there’s been furious activity on the part of our talented developers, Mark and Adam, and our designer, Charles. They’ve carried the spirit of Startup Weekend through to our weekly work sessions and beyond, buckling down in order to crank out a working product.
One of the first blogs we tested the tool on is Sports Medicine Research, a blog that updates frequently on clinical research in sports medicine. We set the tool up on their blog via a Friday phone call. Eventually we hope to make it simple for customers to add the tool to the blogs themselves (the WordPress plugin we’re working on is one step in that direction). The positive flip side is that, by having close contact with every beta tester, we’re building up experience in providing quality customer service. When you’re sending a bunch of emails, it can be easy to forget that there are human beings on both ends. We discovered that the Edit Huddle button wasn’t collecting data on the SportsMed Research page the way we wanted, due to bugs in the CSS. We weren’t comfortable with leaving the button up there when it wasn’t functioning properly, so we made the decision that it’d be better to pull it off. Mark and Adam isolated the specific issues and have been working to resolve them.
Another snag we ran into is browser compatibility. The tool is working well on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, but Internet Explorer was presenting some issues. Incredibly, Internet Explorer still has a 23% market share. If a good quarter of are users are on that one browser, that means we need to get that bug fixed. They just worked it out, and now they can move on to other functionalities and future Edit Huddle iterations. I feel their excitement.
We’re also making changes to our tool based on some feedback. We’ve played around with the size of the “Fix it” button, and we’re also experimenting with the position of the button on the blog post. As you can see from our original demo, the button is at the bottom of the post. We’re preparing to beta test with a blog called Waxing UnLyrical, and we’re going to try putting the button at the top of the post instead:
Charles, our designer, has also been covering a lot of ground. He’s been immensely helpful in reaching out to bloggers to find beta testers, and it was through him that we got guns.com on board. This was a huge boost for us, as the site has 200,000 monthly visitors. On the tech side, Charles designed the logo that you see on our Twitter and Facebook pages. He also just started working on a deck. You can thank him for our pretty website, too.
Our designer and developers are working hard to get the Edit Huddle tool off the ground, and we can’t wait to share it with you! It’s literally impossible to imagine Edit Huddle without them.
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