We're already a month into Summer. Can you believe that? The year is gong by so fast. Some of you may recall at the end I wrote a long flame against Stardock and how it (we) failed the skinning community. I raised 4 points:
- Awful documentation
- Lack of support for skinners
- Lack of community support
- Lack of leadership
So where do things stand since then?
New documentation is in the works and the launch of Wiki.wincustomize.com has allowed Stardock, WinCustomize, and the skinning community to pool resources to put together info on not just Stardock software but everyone else's too in a single combined place.
SkinStudio, is being rewritten from scratch as you saw in the recent preview to provide better support for skinners. Moreover, the program will integrate into the Wiki so that people can give each other tips and help on particular sections.
Lack of leadership is harder to quantify. My beef was that we weren't being proactive enough in the community. What we've done this year is bring Jafo on full-time and Zoomba is now full time on WinCustomize also. Moreover, this year we formed Stardock Design which incorporates the staffs of Pixtudio and SkinPlant together with Stardock's own team. It's like the Dream team of skinning. The results from Stardock Design will hit high gear later this year with some big announcements coming up.
We also recently opened up a new data center in Troy Michigan which, upon completion of the migration, should make WinCustomize substantially faster than it is today.
That isn't to say the road have been bump free. The forums always remain a challenge and while WinCustomize 2007's design was a big improvement over the previous one, we are looking forward to the WinCustomize 2008 design created by Stardock Design which will have a much better look. And I am also looking forward to WindowBlinds 6 which is the first version of WindowBlinds in which the skinners were given the opportunity to come up with features they'd like to have rather than just the development team. There are some really kick ass new features going into WindowBlinds 6.
As for traffic, thanks to Google Analytics, we can monitor that much better. The site gets 12% more page views than last year and about 5% more unique visitors. This would indicate that skinning continues to grow in popularity and the site's faster performance (relative to the old site, the current site is still too slow IMO) is encouraging people to stay longer and look at more stuff.
Probably the biggest challenge right now is the stratification of the Windows market. Windows XP has a whopping 83% of the site's traffic now (Vista only 15%). Windows Vista really is a big improvement. But migration has not been as fast as the migration to XP was. So all new development has to keep this fact in mind. That's why WindowBlinds 6 is getting killer goodies for XP like glass blurring and hardware-assisted animation (Vista skins get these as well).