The TimeControl website follows an educational and information sharing philosophy. That’s not an accident. To talk about how and why we follow that model, we have to look back at HMS Software’s history of publishing our information on the World Wide Web. HMS’s creation predates the Web which came along a good 6 years after our founding. HMS Software’s original website is one of the oldest websites in the world, dating back to the early 1990s. For those who keep track of such things, the HMS site was in the first 7,000 or so sites added (manually) to the old Yahoo website directory during its first year. To put that in context, that’s before Google and at its peak, Yahoo was adding thousands of directory listings per day.
The Yahoo directory was shut down some 10 years ago from this writing.
All websites were educational or information sharing sites at the time. And the HMS website along with the TimeControl website which followed closely behind, were no different.
With the web extending and the types of sites taking advantage of the capabilities of web development tools, a new type of philosophy became the go-to for people like ourselves in the software publishing industry: The Landing Page.
In this model, users were directed to a starting page where, in order to move forward, they would have to give up some identifying information such as a name, an email address, or a company name. Some such sites were more intrusive than others where they would check to see if you were using a generic email account such as gmail.com or hotmail.com or outlook.com and would insist that if you wanted to get to the “good stuff”, you use a corporate email.
Here at HMS, we’ve never been comfortable with that whole concept. I remember visiting a website of a vendor once and, before I had even entered my name, email or phone number, my phone rang right beside me on my desk. “Hello?” I answered. “Hi!” said a bright cheery salesperson. “I see you’re browsing our website and I wanted to see how I could help!” That was so unnerving that I told the cheery fellow to please never call me again and hung up. Thinking on it later, I could see the technology the company used to get my name, and contact information from just visiting the site but the experience was so intrusive, that it felt creepy and stalkerish. I never visited that vendor again but I also made a pledge that HMS would never, ever do the same.
So, the TimeControl and HMS websites are almost all completely open. There are some exceptions. There is a closed client-section where we ask for an email ID and to get access to the free trial site of TimeControl, we ask for an email ID.
All our white papers, brochures, solution pages, testimonials, most of our webcast videos and all client case studies and so, so much more are simply open. How that impacts HMS is that people are welcome to come in and look around and read or watch whatever they want. As a result, when prospective clients do contact us, they are often already very well informed and our sales cycle from that point moves quickly. It also means that if TimeControl is not for a particular opportunity, the client can figure that out without having to run a gauntlet of eager salespeople.
I’ve often been asked if I’m worried about our competitors finding out too much about our products and capabilities and how we should make sure all that remains secret. We’re not worried. HMS advances its products and capabilities constantly. If our competitors think they can catch up, they’re welcome to read along like everyone else. What they’ll never have is the team of people who know the concepts behind project flow and multi-function timesheet systems that TimeControl has.
Interestingly, recent discussions on the future of the web have shown we’re not the only ones highly irritated by “Identification Walls” on a website. The new philosophy of people in this industry seems to be to shift to what we’ve done since the early 1990s and making sites more informational and educational. I wish them all good luck in catching up.
Over the years here at HMS we’ve become used to questions about how TimeControl compares to other products. Our answers are always the same. We don’t publish those kinds of comparisons. Whatever we would say about another product would be unfair as we aren’t experts in whatever those other products are. What we’ve done instead is to provide tools for prospective clients to find out what is great about TimeControl and make it easier to compare against other products.
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