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Just a Personal Point of View
On the Road to Customer Tracking Software
16-Jan-2006      by Susan Pichotta

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Part 5
THE DOWNLOADS

The RegKeeper website is clean and clear. I like that I have to remember only one name for both the product and the website: RegKeeper at regkeeper.com. Their Download button easy to find, in a box on the right. However, that takes me to a page with no less than five choices for downloads... bummer, now I have to stop and read. And think. I just wanted to download a trial version, how tough is that? Ah, I see, they use the Windows installer, and we have downloads with and without. 2 meg vs. 5 meg. And then we have EXE files (huh? what are the others?). This page was obviously written by programmers.

The Berthume Software (CPTracker) website is neat enough, if a little busy, and the Download button jumps right out at you (which is a good thing). Pressing the download button immediately starts a download - way to go, Greg.

Hurstridge Software (Radix) has a nice enough website, but the Download button was a little hard to find. I'm used to finding them on the right (that's where they usually are), but he has it in his menu on the left. Small letters, that menu has. Pressing the button took me to another page (sigh). The headings on this page, with pretty icons, are for the Minimum System Requirements and Installation Notes and Order Radix On CD. When I'm about to get annoyed, I see that the FIRST thing on the page is "Download the Latest Release of Radix", in larger brown letters, and a pretty but boring button that I totally missed on the first pass. My eyes had gone straight to the list of matching blue headings. There's a lesson there, I think.

Last to be downloaded was Shareware Assistant, from Ocloud Software, at eOrderTool.com (3 different names, thanks). They put download links in both their top and bottom menus, easy to find. Selecting Download from there takes me to a webpage giving me a choice of two different products to download, I select Shareware Assistant and away it goes. It downloaded so fast I thought something was wrong! But since I am an admirer of compact code, this could be good.

I now have 4 files downloaded, and I'd like to give some advice to the people who named three of them. I DO NOT KNOW YOUR ACRONYMS, AND IT IS NOT MY JOB TO MEMORIZE THEM. I'm sure "swa" and "rksetupsm" and "setupcpt" mean a lot to you, but the file name I like best is "RadixSetup". I don't have make guesses or have a perfect memory when I see that file name. With the others, the first thing I have to do is rename them while I still remember what the acronyms stand for. So, swa, rk and cpt: annoying me and causing me an extra step is not a good way to start. And those silly file names guarantee that anyone who doesn't load your software right away will forget what's in the setup files 10 minutes after downloading them.