Oriador Staff Schedule?
Posted by Gavin Bowman on Friday, December 16, 2005 at 9:51 AM
It's looking that way.
I've wondered for a while about the international relevance of the word "rota", and after this discussion on the JoS forum, I see that the situation might be much worse than I had ever thought. Even though I'd realized that most of the world probably wouldn't be searching for "staff rota" as their first choice, it hadn't really clicked with me that even if they did find our software, the word "rota" could be confusing or distracting.
So, my plan at the moment is to launch a new site for Oriador Staff Schedule, and run that side by side with the existing site for a while (it'll probably be months before I start seeing any traffic from the search engines anyway). The new site will link to the same installation package for now, but come the next release, there will be two different versions (same product, different labels). I'll figure out where to go from there based on what happens with the new site... possibly a situation where the Oriador site becomes primarily focused on staff scheduling, while preserving the rota themed pages for existing links.
As most of the traffic here on my blog comes from outside the UK, I'll be updating the links here to refer to the new site, rather than the Oriador Rota one.
In case you've never heard the word before, a "rota" is basically just a staff schedule, timetable or roster.
Update: I've launched a basic new site for the product, with less of a UK feel, and with staff scheduling software as the primary keywords: Oriador Staff Scheduling.
5 Comments:
Just my 2 cents, but I wouldn't switch the name. I don't think the name is the problem at all. People buy software with meaningless names all the time. Google is a 20 billion dollar meaningless name.
I think your only issue search engine optimization. Either put staff schedule on your homepage or create a special gateway page. Once you get them on the site as long as you're clear that it's a scheduling package the name isn't going to matter.
I'm definitely keeping the brand name Oriador, which is meaningless enough on it's own, but I wonder if having two essentially meaningless words will work.
I guess I could add an extra phase into the plan, build the new site but keep the Rota in the product name, see how that goes... it would save a lot of trouble if it was workable. I could bring the word Rota to the rest of the world!
I think I'm going to have to play it by ear over the coming months, and pay a lot of attention to the web site logs. First step is still a site built around Oriador as Staff Scheduler, with a more global approach to the screenshots and pricing info.
I think it's the "Rota Software" that gets me... huh?
Hmm... so you would still find it confusing if it was called Oriador Rota, even if in the name was the only place the word Rota was used?
I don't see why you want to create a new parallel site, and start from scratch with Google.
"Rota" isn't in the current URL, so just fix the current site.
And as Ian said, you need to get down and dirty with SEO.
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