Migrating from taskspro.com

With the 1.7 release, I’ve moved the primary home of my Tasks Pro™ product from:

http://www.taskspro.com

to:

http://crowdfavorite.net/tasks-pro/

I thought it might be interesting (instructive?) to review the reasons for this, and how I got into the situation in the first place.

When I launched alexking.org back in 2002, I put up some of my projects here for download. This included the original Tasks™ (now Tasks Jr.). As support for Tasks™ grew, I received a number of requests to create a multi-user version of Tasks™ (which you know as Tasks Pro™).

I’d been using King Design (kingdesign.net) on-again/off-again since 1997, mainly as a web design and hosting storefront. I’d actually taken down the entire site back in 2003 as I wasn’t doing any outside work at the time anyway.

When I was getting ready to launch Tasks Pro™, it was my first commercial product and I hadn’t decided:

1. if I was going to continue using the King Design name, and
2. if I was going to offer any other commercial products

and I was able to register taskspro.com, which definitely seemed like a good choice to use for the product site. So when I launched Tasks Pro™ (and until this week), its home was at taskspro.com.

Everything seemed to make sense to me at the time:

• Non-commercial software was at alexking.org
• Tasks Pro™ had its own web site and store

But soon after launching Tasks Pro™, I started hearing from my Tasks™ users that wanted some of the new features in Tasks Pro™ but didn’t need the multi-user capabilities. And pretty soon, I had a commercial version of Tasks™ out as well.

At first, I kept both the commercial version and free version of Tasks™ on alexking.org. After all, people were already coming to alexking.org for Tasks™, so offering both versions there made a certain amount of sense. But it was awkward having that lone commercial product on the site. At this time, kingdesign.net was still a landing page.

When I completed the first major update to Tasks Pro™ and Tasks™ (versions 1.5 and 2.5 respectively), I decided to re-launch the King Design web site as my business storefront. In doing so, I moved the Tasks™ home to kingdesign.net. However, I already had a full site for Tasks Pro™ at taskspro.com and already had traffic, etc. there¹; so instead of moving Tasks Pro™ to kingdesign.net, I left it at taskspro.com and created a summary page pointing to taskspro.com on kingdesign.net.

While this wasn’t a horrible solution it had some definite drawbacks:

• I had ‘purchase’, ‘download’, ‘contact’ and ’support’ mechanisms at both sites (I migrated all of the downloads and support to kingdesign.net over time).
• I had documentation at both sites, but only had FAQs on kingdesign.net.
• New visitors would have to switch between two sites to compare the products.
• Visitors hitting taskspro.com would sometimes miss the links to Tasks™ and contact me to ask about a single user version (meaning many more probably didn’t bother).
• My flagship product had a rather weak representation on my business site.

With all of this in mind, I knew I needed to migrate Tasks Pro™ to kingdesign.net. However, there are other factors to consider as well. For one, taskspro.com has a pretty decent Google ranking. In addition, I’ve had customers going to taskspro.com for three years now. I couldn’t just cut it off entirely.

So with the new releases, I finally bit the bullet and moved all of the primary Tasks Pro™ content to kingdesign.net. I didn’t get rid of the taskspro.com site entirely though.

• There are still active trials of Tasks Pro™ on taskspro.com - I didn’t want to mess with moving them.
• I wanted a transition time for folks used to going to taskspro.com to make their way to kingdesign.net.
• As previously mentioned, taskspro.com shows up pretty well in Google, and I didn’t want to give that up right away.

So now taskspro.com is a landing page of sorts, with minimal information and pointers to kingdesign.net. Over time I may deprecate it further, perhaps to the point where it merely directs people to kingdesign.net/tasks-pro/ the way tasks.biz² points to kingdesign.net/tasks/.

Now that I’ve made the move, I feel good about it and I’m glad I did it. That normally means it was the right decision.

1. Plus re-doing something that already “works” when there is so much new work to be done it a tough thing to prioritize. [back]
2. I’ll follow-up on this in a future post. [back]

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