Aug25Written by:SuperUser
Wednesday, August 25, 2010 
Our long-time customers know that our website has changed significantly over the past few months. What’s pretty obvious to the casual observer is our new user interface. It’s cleaner and easier to quickly figure out what we do and what Jinx is all about. Jinx is a software quality tool that positively detects concurrency errors in your code. Our customers have reported that Jinx often finds bugs 20-100 times faster than simply running stress tests without Jinx. Jinx will give you confidence in your code and help you find those pesky concurrency errors that are probably rife throughout your applications.
What may be less obvious is what we’re doing under the covers. This isn’t really a post about Jinx per se, rather it’s an opportunity for us to share with you some of the things we’ve learned in building a truly state of the art website. We carefully selected the vendors we’re using and we’re extremely pleased with the results so far.
Our website consists of six main components:
Our web front-end is built using ASP.NET. We could have chosen any number of technologies here and, indeed, there are some advantages to going with Ruby or PHP (lower cost, for one). In the end, we chose something with the greatest possible convenience in terms of editing content for both our technical and non-technical users. Plus, as the former Visual Studio marketing guy, I have a personal affection for the .NET Framework and Visual Studio.
The real magic in our website lies in what is behind ASP.NET.
We use Optify to track usage of our site. Optify gives us intelligence about companies that have visited our site and the pages they’ve looked at. We can tell, for example, which pieces of content that we’ve written lead to a registered user. That helps us focus our content development efforts on the type of information that is actually useful to you, and steers us away from content that only makes us feel good for creating it. So far, we can tell that the more technical resources we build, the more registrations we get. This is consistent with what I’ve learned in my 15 years of experience marketing products to developers at Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, and Amazon. Expect to see a lot more technical content in the near future.
Once a customer registers on our site, Optify pours all of the data it has directly into an entry that is created in Salesforce. When our sales team talks to a customer, we don’t have to waste time telling him or her what he or she already knows. Instead, we can ask good questions about how well the product is working in a production environment, if there’s anything we can do to help the adoption process along, and if the customer needs any on-site assistance from our Sales Engineering team.
That’s great for customers who visit our site directly and who have heard about us already. But we also have to reach out to developers that maybe haven’t heard about us. In order to find these types of developers, we use Jigsaw (which is now a Salesforce company). I’ve never been more impressed with a company than I have with Jigsaw. Jigsaw is a crowd-sourced database of users worldwide. With Jigsaw, we’re able to generate a list of “Software Developers” or “Software Development Managers” and email them one by one. But the truly impressive thing about Jigsaw is their customer service. From the moment we signed up, we were hand-held by a team of customer service and technical reps who helped us setup Jigsaw, integrate it with Salesforce, and teach us the best (and legal, per CAN-SPAM laws) way to use the product. They’ve been amazingly responsive on email as well. Any marketing or sales pro out there owes it to him or herself to check out Jigsaw and, at the very least, steal best practices from how they run their organization.
For our email communication system, we chose MailChimp. There are a number of tools out there that are more sophisticated, have better integration with Salesforce, and provide more flexibility. But they also tend to be a bear to get started with and there tends to be a lot of upsells to services that, frankly, in this day and age, ought to “just work”. I mentioned Jigsaw above, and they’re a great example of a company that sells you a valuable service and then walks you through all the setup. The email services tend to charge you for integration help, and that’s too bad. With MailChimp, we were able to sign up, export a list of contacts from Salesforce, and send out emails. They make sure we comply with CAN-SPAM laws, track all unsubscribes for us, and have some incredibly useful reports to track metrics. It’s a manual process, but it’s really easy and not that burdensome, to be truthful.
We host our entire web infrastructure on Amazon Web Services, a service that’s near and dear to my heart (I was the Marketing Director at AWS for two years). AWS is incredibly easy to get started with and even easier to use. I can’t imagine a world where we’d be running our own web servers. We use Amazon S3 to host all of our images and media files, Amazon EC2 to host our Windows and Linux web servers, and Amazon CloudFront as our content distribution network (for faster download times on our customers’ ends). We split up our Amazon EC2 instances across Availability Zones in the East Region and front-end them with an Elastic Load Balancer (to spread load between Availability Zones) and an Auto Scaler (to automatically spin up new instances when traffic warrants).
Recently, we shipped Jinx 1.0 and, with it, we needed to be able to take payment for Jinx purchases made online. We were debating whether we should run our own payment service, but in the end the obvious choice was Amazon Flexible Payments Service, or Amazon FPS. We admit, we’re a new company, and not every customer is willing to trust a new company with their payment information and extremely sensitive financial information. With Amazon FPS, we securely shuttle our customers over to Amazon.com when it’s time for payment, where they then use their Amazon.com credentials and credit cards to complete the purchase. Once the purchase is done, they are brought back to our site. At Corensic, we never see any of your personal payment information. This is great for us as well as our customers.
Finally, we recently had an awesome little video made up that describes what Jinx does. This video is intended for non-technical audiences and should describe our product in 60 seconds. We used Lilipip to build it, and we're extremely pleased with their work. Check them out and tell them we sent you!
We like to think of our website as being as state-of-the-art as our products. If you’re interested in more information on how we built our site, or about Jinx for Windows or Jinx for Linux, please don’t hesitate to Contact Us.
Our website was put together by the good folks at ekeepo.
We're also interested in hearing any best practices you may have, including your favorite web services vendors. Please fire away in the comments area!
Sincerely,
Prashant Sridharan
The Marketing Guy
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