The freeer, the simpler - the better

I'd like to share an experience with you. It's about a multimedia e-learning portal that we've been developing now for three years. It has undergone 2 major changes. The idea was born when I was driving to a meeting with my boss and we said that it would be great to have a place on the internet where you'd be able to learn by watching videos and listening to instructions.

So little planning, little developing and Clippy's Web was born. It was a great portal and it had videos in slovene language. Super. But the results didn't quite arrive. Why? Because we've decided that only part of contents will be for free and the other part for "premium" - paying members.

With a lot of effort in creating contents, marketing the portal, etc. we simply didn't get as many visits and members as we wished. So we decided for a change - a portal called B4Learning. We've changed the system in a way that each had to be a member and we also offered free membership. Like a benefit for being a member each received his own mini-portal with access to training videos, his own calendar and a place where to publish his/her files online. GREAT... Yeah, maybe for geeks like us. We've had even less visits and even less members!!!

No way! It was a time almost to panic. So at last we saw that the model of Internet is to offer for free. So now we have all the contents available in the new portal - Piflar's Web (meaning a Geek's Web) without any hassle of registration, long processes etc. You enter the portal and you can access the tips you like.

And I'm happy to see that the results are starting to show! So the model of free like the most popular model of Internet (freeware, open source etc.) is the winning model. Earning some money from it? That's a topic for next time. In my next post I'll also share some free tools you can find on the Internet for your computer or the web.