Lawyers and accountants, accounts payable, general ledger. Anyone who needs to have a .PDF, print it, sign it, scan it back. In large quantities.
I visited your site. It is simple and straightforward. But something surprised me: I was expecting the likes of Accenture, E&Y, Genpact, someone like that, as a target market (internal solutions may exist in these companies, but I have never encountered them, always a cropped screenshot then copy-pasted document, and this has been thousands of times).
Smaller clients does make sense: your target market as smaller clients could knock the pants off larger clients (in a small, accounts payable way) in terms of style an appearance. Can you get your clients to integrate to SAP or other accounting systems?
In direct answer to your questions (Firefox on Mint Ubuntu/Linux/GNU):
I am not a fan of the typography. For polish, add a bit of line-spacing, in the bullets in particular.
Perhaps separate each section (topic area) of the front page with a different background (I know this is terribly Bootstrap, but hey).
Registration: Do not advertise a lack of credibility / assuredness. But do not demand intrusive personal information (turns off both corporate types trying something out and technologists for a myriad of reasons).
I did not detect an option for HTTPS. This is a must for any site proposing dealing or storing financial or client information.
Try a start up form on the front page, or a direct shot of a demo. Include use cases and customer comments (do not fake these, make them checkable - check with your commenters this is OK beforehand).
Word of mouth counts for a lot, especially in professional circles that do not use social media (other than perhaps talk to one's family and old friends). Get a foothold with some oldskool businesses, then when you have a little coming in as revenue seek ways to pump it up (when you've shown it is a credible service this is orders of magnitude easier, in the most unexpected ways).
About https. I am ashamed that I've not yet purchased a recognized certificate. There should be a self signed certificate running, but since I did not set up my own CA, this is not really ready for production. The example code in the documentation does not verify the ssl endpoint. I need to fix that..
How do others handle this?
I wanted to buy a signature from a CA that is recognized by the majority of browsers and build my own CA for the API.
btw, StartSSL offers free SSL certs that work with most browsers.
If something goes wrong then StartSSL revocation is not free but as the revocation system is pretty broken anyways u might not care, see [1] for details, if interested.
I'd use a recognized CA also for the API (smth recognized by all supported language SDKs). It can be a trouble to guide users through adding your CA as trusted CA for each case. Python, Java etc look up certs with a different strategy/have different CA truststores. For me namecheap has been one of the best offers for cheap SSL certs when StartSSL becomes too inflexible [2] or is not supported widely enough [3].
[2] Each free StartSSL domain can have exactly one alternate domain name, so you can have one cert with both template2pdf.com and www.template2pdf.com OR template2pdf.com and api.template2pdf.com OR www.template2pdf.com and api.template2pdf.com.
[3] AFAIK at least java 6 & 7 does NOT ship with StartSSL CA included in truststore.
You can. Please provide the source, I'm not aware of such constraint.
EDIT: The marketing speech that is often used to claim that more expensive certs are for more serious business is mostly baseless. Yes, you can pay to have your identity checked more carefully and pay even more to get the extended validation and a green bar, but this is "eye-candy" for most cases.
quote: Class 1 certificates are limited to client and server
certificates, whereas the later is restricted in its usage for non-commercial purpose only. Subscribers MUST upgrade to Class 2 or higher level for any domain and site of commercial nature, when using high-profile brands and names or if involved in obtaining or relaying sensitive information such as health records, financial details, personal information etc.
They certainly had issues with issuing cert for domain name suggesting it is doing financial operations, but otherwise so far every purely commercial-nature domains successfully granted certs in my case. But obviously it is startssl call and they might change their mind anytime.
Comments
Lawyers and accountants, accounts payable, general ledger. Anyone who needs to have a .PDF, print it, sign it, scan it back. In large quantities.
I visited your site. It is simple and straightforward. But something surprised me: I was expecting the likes of Accenture, E&Y, Genpact, someone like that, as a target market (internal solutions may exist in these companies, but I have never encountered them, always a cropped screenshot then copy-pasted document, and this has been thousands of times).
Smaller clients does make sense: your target market as smaller clients could knock the pants off larger clients (in a small, accounts payable way) in terms of style an appearance. Can you get your clients to integrate to SAP or other accounting systems?
In direct answer to your questions (Firefox on Mint Ubuntu/Linux/GNU):
I am not a fan of the typography. For polish, add a bit of line-spacing, in the bullets in particular.
Perhaps separate each section (topic area) of the front page with a different background (I know this is terribly Bootstrap, but hey).
Registration: Do not advertise a lack of credibility / assuredness. But do not demand intrusive personal information (turns off both corporate types trying something out and technologists for a myriad of reasons).
I did not detect an option for HTTPS. This is a must for any site proposing dealing or storing financial or client information.
Try a start up form on the front page, or a direct shot of a demo. Include use cases and customer comments (do not fake these, make them checkable - check with your commenters this is OK beforehand).
Word of mouth counts for a lot, especially in professional circles that do not use social media (other than perhaps talk to one's family and old friends). Get a foothold with some oldskool businesses, then when you have a little coming in as revenue seek ways to pump it up (when you've shown it is a credible service this is orders of magnitude easier, in the most unexpected ways).
Thanks for your input.
About https. I am ashamed that I've not yet purchased a recognized certificate. There should be a self signed certificate running, but since I did not set up my own CA, this is not really ready for production. The example code in the documentation does not verify the ssl endpoint. I need to fix that..
How do others handle this?
I wanted to buy a signature from a CA that is recognized by the majority of browsers and build my own CA for the API.
btw, StartSSL offers free SSL certs that work with most browsers.
If something goes wrong then StartSSL revocation is not free but as the revocation system is pretty broken anyways u might not care, see [1] for details, if interested.
I'd use a recognized CA also for the API (smth recognized by all supported language SDKs). It can be a trouble to guide users through adding your CA as trusted CA for each case. Python, Java etc look up certs with a different strategy/have different CA truststores. For me namecheap has been one of the best offers for cheap SSL certs when StartSSL becomes too inflexible [2] or is not supported widely enough [3].
[1] http://www.ahtik.com/blog/startssl-revocation-fees-will-not-...
[2] Each free StartSSL domain can have exactly one alternate domain name, so you can have one cert with both template2pdf.com and www.template2pdf.com OR template2pdf.com and api.template2pdf.com OR www.template2pdf.com and api.template2pdf.com.
[3] AFAIK at least java 6 & 7 does NOT ship with StartSSL CA included in truststore.
You can't use the free certificate for commercial sites.
You can. Please provide the source, I'm not aware of such constraint.
EDIT: The marketing speech that is often used to claim that more expensive certs are for more serious business is mostly baseless. Yes, you can pay to have your identity checked more carefully and pay even more to get the extended validation and a green bar, but this is "eye-candy" for most cases.
Nothing at https://www.startssl.com/?app=1 tells that free Class 1 cert is not allowed for commercial purposes.
http://www.startssl.com/policy.pdf section 3.1.2.1 -- they sure don't mention that front-and-center, though.
quote: Class 1 certificates are limited to client and server certificates, whereas the later is restricted in its usage for non-commercial purpose only. Subscribers MUST upgrade to Class 2 or higher level for any domain and site of commercial nature, when using high-profile brands and names or if involved in obtaining or relaying sensitive information such as health records, financial details, personal information etc.
They certainly had issues with issuing cert for domain name suggesting it is doing financial operations, but otherwise so far every purely commercial-nature domains successfully granted certs in my case. But obviously it is startssl call and they might change their mind anytime.
you can always get free and good ssl cert from startssl.com