New BeeDocs.com Website
Friday, December 12, 2008
I just launched a brand new version of the beedocs.com website. This is our fourth major site design in the history of the company and this one was nearly a year in the making. Thanks to Turnstyle for the graphic design. Thanks to all of the Bee Docs Timeline customers who shared their timelines.
The site has some new features for customers that I would like to point out:
A consolidated movie library with our tutorial and demo videos.
Bee Docs Timeline help documentation is now online, including several updated tutorials.
As much as possible, all of the timelines that appear on the site were created by customers. However, there is room for more. If you have a great timeline that you would like to share for this purpose, please contact me.
We now have hand-printed BEEDOCS shirts for sale.
About Us page is updated and contains more ways to contact me.
Education discounts and site licenses are now available.
Movies have all been transcribed. This should be particularly helpful for those who would like to use a translation service.
Movies are now optimized for iPhone viewing.
Pages automatically optimize themselves for printing.
This update also completes our brand transition from “Bee Documents” to “Bee Docs.”
For those of you who are interested in the business and marketing side of things, I would like to tell you about the ways that I have refined my strategy based on my experiences over the past year.
The previous website had two specific messages that is was designed to communicate. The first was “timelines created with Bee Docs Timeline are beautiful” and the second was “timelines created with Bee Docs Timeline are quick and easy to create.” I wrote these down before beginning the design and wrote a lot marketing copy along those lines.
A wise friend saw the site and advised that I show these messages instead of telling them. Based on that advice, I stripped out most of the text and came up with the design that featured six timeline charts, each with a short movie showing the timeline being created in a few minutes or less.
I believe this design successfully communicated the two messages, unfortunately these were the wrong messages. The messages that Bee Docs Timeline creates beautiful charts and is easy-to-use were a result of comparing Bee Docs Timeline to other timeline charting products. Two observations have influenced my change of strategy.
Observation #1: I have sold Bee Docs Timeline to approximately 0.03% of the active Mac OS X user base. That means that I have sold a license to about one out of every 4,000 Mac OS X users. I’m guessing this is a good number compared to the competition. However, it is obviously not huge slice of the pie.
Observation #2: When I show Bee Docs Timeline to family and friends or other people who are not necessarily shopping for timeline software the most frequent thing I hear is, “That looks like really cool software, too bad I do not have any need for timelines.” In other words, “Why the heck would I want to make a timeline?”
My conclusion from these two observations is that I should not waste any more time trying to convince people that Bee Docs Timeline is the best timeline software. Rather, I should focus my marketing efforts evangelizing the usefulness of timelines in general. I want to convert a big chunk of the other 99.97% rather than focus on the ones that are already convinced then need a timeline creation tool.
So here are the top three messages that I specified for the new site design. I kept these in front of me when I was designing the site architecture, layout, imagery, and text copy. I asked Turnstyle to focus on these when they were doing the graphic design.
Answer the question: Why are timelines relevant to me?
Diverse, interesting, and successful people use Bee Docs Timeline
Timelines made with Bee Docs Timeline are beautiful (had to keep that one in there)
Hopefully at least the first message will sink in for visitors to the website, even if they only spend a few seconds on the site!
New Bee Docs Logo!
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Here is the new logo. Designed by Turnstyle in Seattle.
I think they did a brilliant job of capturing the brand characteristics I described last week as well as creating something that is beautiful in its own right. I hope you like it too!
Bee Documents to Bee Docs
Friday, August 01, 2008
As part of our branding refresh, I am renaming the company from "Bee Documents" to "Bee Docs"
When I founded the company, I had the idea of referring to the company as "Bee Documents" and using the short version for the products. For example, Bee Docs' Timeline, Bee Docs' Discover, and Bee Docs' Number Stamper. Back in 2002, the company was focussed on document management products and services, thus the "Documents" in Bee Documents.
For the past two years, the number of Google searches for Bee Docs has been twice the number of searches for Bee Documents which tells me that Bee Docs is sticking better in people's minds. It is nice and short for typing and has less connection with document management, which is an field we no longer service. Besides, "Bee Docs" is fun to say don't you think?
I'm currently converting our e-mail addressed from beedocuments.com to beedocs.com and will soon begin to convert the website. Hopefully you won't notice any interruptions during the transition, but let me know if you do. All of the old addresses should redirect and forward, so no need to worry about it unless you want your Address Book to be cutting edge with the latest name.
I can't wait to unveil the new logo, those who have seen the drafts have been very enthusiastic about it. Stay tuned! I hope to have the final version from the designers in the next couple weeks and will post it here first.
Labels: beedocs, beedocuments, brand, company name, domain, rename
The Bee Docs' Brand
Friday, July 25, 2008
As I have mentioned before, I have been working with graphic designers on an update of our logo, website, and marketing materials. As part of this effort, I have been working on defining and clarifying the Bee Documents brand.
By "brand" I mean the characteristics that make Bee Documents unique. What makes us different than Microsoft, Apple, OmniGroup, Delicious Monster, Panic, or anyone else? This is a marketing question because the marketing should communicate and reinforce the brand to customers who are learning about Bee Documents.
However besides marketing, the "brand" question is also important, even more important, for other reasons. It can serve as a guide for choosing new products to develop, employees to hire, features to prioritize, and more. A strong brand is not just about perception, but also about reality. For me, the "brand" serves as a goal and guide, a representation of the way I want to do business as well as the way I want others to think of the company.
With that said, here are four pillars of the Bee Docs brand to which I gave a lot of thought and presented to the design team working on the new logo:
HUMAN TOUCHFirst and foremost, I want Bee Documents to be about people. The people who use the products, the people that make the products, students, teachers, artists, film makers, professionals, parents, writers... The list goes on and on.
Sending out hand written thank you notes is an example of an effort to make a human connection to customers. The new website will feature customers and their work as much as our product. We'll continue to seek out ways of bringing humanity, human relationships, and human contact to the center of our brand.
Not enough software companies focus on people (I include my own in this criticism). I do have to give a shout out to Plasq though who gets this more than anyone else I've seen. Their customers are featured all over their website. Their team has also been very thoughtful and encouraging in communicating with me personally, even before I won any awards etc... Props to Plasq. Patagonia and U2 have also been inspirational for me in this regard.
NATURE INSPIREDI believe nature contains the very best examples of design both in form and function. So many tech companies look to other tech companies for inspiration and it shows in their products and marketing. I hope to look to nature for inspiration and I want people to feel that connection when they use our products or encounter our marketing.
ARTISANWhat I mean by "artisan" is products that reflect the designers point of view, a distinct character, and a connection to a specific culture. In other words, the opposite of generic or anonymous. Artisan products don't seek to please everyone but they are made and consumed with passion. To me artisan also implies a relationship between producer and consumer (see Human Touch).
CINEMATICApple has been encouraging developers to be "Cinematic." This is a challenge that I embrace. Not only do I want our marketing and products to be cinematic, I also want to enable our customers to be cinematic using our products. To me, cinematic means excitement, motion, sound, storytelling, and expression in a highly visual medium.
So those are big goals! I believe our work so far has reflected these characteristics but that it will be a continuous journey to reflect them even stronger. Some of these characteristics have been part of my brand thinking since the beginning in 2002 ("Nature Inspired"), some are newer ("Cinematic"). I'm sure the brand will continue to evolve as we learn and as we grow.
Labels: artisan, brand, branding, business, cinematic, marketing, nature
Rethinking the brand
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Thank you to everyone who left a comment on the two logos I posted. You didn’t say what I thought you were going to say, so it was very educational to hear your first impressions.
As you may have guessed, I have begun a process to rethink the brand of Bee Documents. I picked the name and came up with the concept for the original logo (pictured here) in December 2002. At the time, I was working exclusively on a web-based document management system for lawyers, thus the “Documents” in Bee Documents.
In the last five and a half years a lot has changed. The focus of the company is now timeline software, I have much more business and life experience, and the company generates income to name the first three things that come to mind. I’ve decided it is time to update the branding. It is an ongoing process, but hopefully you will see some improvements to the brand in the coming months. Eventually the changes should show up on the website, blog, videos, product design, etc…
By the way, the black and white logo that I posted first was meant to represent the stamen and other inside parts of a flower. I had this ambitious concept that instead of making the viewer look at a bee, the perspective would be reversed and the viewer would become the bee looking at the flower. Out of the concepts that I have played with so far, this was my personal favorite but I can see now that it is too abstract for folks to grasp at first glance. So, back to the drawing board…
Branding Part II
Friday, July 22, 2005
Speaking of brand… I noticed this Business Week report that Apple’s brand equity has risen 16%. What is interesting are the words they use to describe Apple: outpacing, breakthrough, iconic, innovation. I would add “cool” and “design conscious” to the list, but it pretty well sums up Apple’s brand.
I wanted to blog some of the marketing choices we have made to help build a brand of historic innovation, craftsmanship, and simplicity. First, is our name, “Bee Documents.” I wanted to find a name that was easy to say and was based on a real word. I like the "brand" that bees have going for them: busy, engineers, fond of flowers, and aggressive. It seemed like the potential was there to create a logo that would instantly make sense, like Apple’s logo which is very easy to remember.
Speaking of logos, I designed an ugly draft of the logo and then gave it to a designer who tweaked the spacing and made it look nice. It was a priority to have a logo that could be displayed in one color and would be readable at very small sizes. I’m very happy with it, though it may evolve slightly to reflect a more timeless look. It would be nice to have a logo that looks like it could have been used 50-100 years ago.
All our printed materials are on thick 100% cotton papers and use the Adobe Garamond typeface which is beautiful and historic. Every business letter, contract, and quote uses the same font, in the same size, with the same margins and spacing. We always use Adobe InDesign as a word processor as it does the right thing with OpenType fonts (Word and Pages do not). I’m thinking of printing my next round of letterhead, business cards, and blog cards with a letterpress (in black and white) to push the craftsmanship feeling even further. My wife and I sent out baby announcements a few months ago that were letterpressed from metal type onto thick cotton paper from the oldest paper factory in Italy and they turned out very nice. I’d love that kind of look for our marketing materials. The unfortunate thing is that the look is hard to translate into a web site. Maybe someday I’ll find an innovative graphic design artist that can build a web site look that better compliments the older print techniques. I like our web site now, but it would be better if it could more tightly integrate with our print branding.
The last thing I wanted to mention is personal branding. As a very small company, the people have as much or more brand value than the company itself. This is something that I realized a few months ago and started making more of an effort to brand myself. The blog is part of this, participating in user groups is part, and writing articles for other site/publishers is part. Think about Apple, or Microsoft, or Amazon. These companies have very public leaders who are an integral part of their companies brand (for better or for worse). I have come to accept that being a founder means developing a personal brand and reputation that contributed to the company brand.
Labels: apple, bee documents, brand, logo