As we get all set to release Chronon 3, we noticed that some elements of our website were causing confusing among our visitors, thus we decided to update it. Below is the description of what we changed and why we did so.

What has changed

The changes we made really boil down to the 2 most visited links on the header menu of the website: 'Pricing' and 'Download'.

The change we have made is that we have removed those links from the header menu.

Why remove links from the header menu?

Now, you are probably thinking why would we remove what are probably the most visited and important pages of the website!?

Well, first of, rest assured, the pages still do exist, they have just been moved around to a more appropriate location. Details are as follows:

As it turns out, when we launched last year with our first product, the Chronon Time Travelling Debugger, we were a single product company, so it made sense to have a single pricing page and a single download page. It caused no confusion whatsoever for the visitors since they got exactly what they were looking for.

However, fast forward to now, we have multiple products, 3 in fact:

1. Chronon Time Travelling Debugger
2. Chronon Recording Server
3. Embedded Chronon

We even branded the 'solution' we offer as a combination of these products as 'DVR for Java' and came up with a brand new redesign and look and feel of the website in October 2011.

As it turns out, the redesign was an evolution of the structure of the previous website. Thus, although it had a 'Products' menu, allowing you to view each product, it still had a single 'Pricing' and 'Download' page. And this led to a ton of confusion for the visitors.

Confusions Abound

For example, here is the previous 'Download' page:

As you can see it contains downloads for both the Recording Server and the Time Travelling Debugger.

However, a lot of visitors to the site who came because they heard of the the Time Travelling Debugger, when they clicked the Download link, and saw a download button for the Recording Server, it got them utterly confused.

In fact, we received so many support mails on that, that we actually had to put a section on the side which literally said 'What is the Chronon Recording Server', along with the links to the Product Overview page to explain that we have multiple products.

A clickmap of the download page showed that these links were indeed being visited by a lot of users and thus provided us with more evidence that there was a ton of confusion.

In the pricing page, we tried to solve this problem by tabs and having different tabs for each product.

Again this was not a perfect solution since, the tabs were not all that eye catching and still didnt give the user an instant feedback that there are multiple products involved.

The new changes

So to simplify things, we have removed the single page 'Download' and 'Pricing' from the top menu bar and placed 'Download' and 'Buy' buttons on the pages of each product.

This way there is no confusion, if you are on the Time Travelling Debugger product page and click on the 'Download' or 'Buy' button, you don't see the Recording Server. Same with the Recording Server buttons.

 Also since you probably got to the Recording Server page, by clicking on the 'Products' menu item, you know that multiple products are involved.

We hope this change will simplify things a lot for our visitors.

More to come....

We are still working on making continuous improvements to the website as we go along and in the spirit of the 'Engineering Chronon' blog, we will keep you informed of the changes and the rational behind those changes.