We had another record setting month over at Emurse.com. Traffic was up something fierce, largely from various SEO improvements (all of the new traffic was organic, no paid links/ads/whatever)

I really think it was the result of ongoing work throughout the first quarter. April was big, but if you zoom out and measure from say, February, its been astounding. We're looking at 200% growth easy. Combine these improvements with the new look we launched a couple weeks back (mike is the man), and we get the month of April.

As far as accomplishing the objectives we laid out at the start of the year, we changed gears a little bit in late February. We started assembling the pieces to the "new" emurse project and realized that a complete I.A. overhaul was in order. Our focus then became the new look and feel, and it has really paid off in spades. Our conversions are up, we're all buzzing with excitement, and really, we just look much more like we ought to now. Sometimes it helps to stay flexible and responsive I guess ;)

We're focused on getting back to some of these shelved things now, though we've decided to break apart some of the components and bolt a few of the features on independently. This lets us easily test out the concept (much like we're doing with contact manager on network). It's a lot easier to get a solid idea of how something will play out once you can measure, tweak and change based on the responses. It's kind of like having a beta, but a bit more effective in that they are completely usable features on their own. (less about bug testing).

We'll probably contact our beta list about participating in a limited trial first though, so stay tuned. Also, drop me a line if you would like to be considered.

Recent Emurse Blog Posts:

• Phone Interview Tips
• New Resume Design
  

General

Traffic increases continue to impress us. March 2007 was the highest traffic month in our history, eclipsing our initial launch numbers when we were all over the web. March also set the bar for revenue in all categories.

Development

Some of the things we thought would be priorities this quarter have been delayed until next. We're getting better and better at understanding our metrics, and really think we can improve a few things before releasing all the new features. Changing our internal design (signed in users) helped improve things greatly, we're expecting even more success with the next couple of changes.

Currently Around the Web

• Sean Lavelle tries his hand at building up his online persona, starting with Emurse. Word on the street is that we are now Nadine's #1 search result after an initial rocky start. I'm positive Sean will have great success right away though!
  

• Host multiple resumes
• Optional e-mail alerts when a resume is viewed
• A new HTML badge for your pretty little website
• Hide specific aspects of your Personal Information on different hosted Resumes
• 3 new Resume templates (alex.emurse.com for "Royal", at least, for now ;)
• *Tons* of template fixes and rendering changes (lots of stuff on the backend in that regard)
• New formatting code produces much better results, specifically on bulleted lists
• Lots more, but, thats the really interesting stuff, and my ADD is something awful right now... ;)

We've also quietly (we haven't officially announced anything yet) built in the structure for paid accounts. Accounts will be yearly starting at $25. Everything that was in the system for free before is still free (sans a small limit on how many resumes people can create). We will always maintain this free level of service, cause, really, everything on the web should have some level of free to it (in my opinion at least). If you like Emurse and you think we're doing a good job, please support us where you can!

Back in DC... For today... Then off again tomorrow morning for another month long excursion, this time, east coast style. We have a Weblogs, Inc./Blogsmith meeting in NYC next week, and then some things to attend to down in Orlando, Fl (go knights). It's great to be home though, if only for a couple of nights. In my head, my apartment was on fire and looted or something completely crazy like that. Not so much, everything was right where I left it. On the floor. Sweet.

Emurse is still doing phenomenal. We're talking to a bunch of different folks both in the search world and in the recruiting world (and we'd like to hear from you, if we haven't yet touched base somehow). We're working on rolling out the premium accounts soon (we're perfectionists...). We have an affiliate program coming together that we'll formalize and announce soon. We have three new templates coming online and a completely new share tab complete with all of the neato features our amazing user community has sent in. We finished a cobranding structure for various requested partnerships the other day as well (contact us if you'd like to get in on it)

All in all, things are on the up. I know we've been quiet on the blog this past week, but, well.. it's for good reasons ;) Stay tuned and we'll get this stuff out as soon as our numb little fingers will let us.

First though, I'm going to enjoy a quality nights rest in my own bed before getting on a plane tomorrow and doing it all again.

Firefox Extension / API:

We're still toying with it, but one of our friends whipped together a quick prototype for us, and well, it's just neat. We'll announce it and make it available over on our blog soon, but we're hoping to get some feedback first. Basically, it allows you to right click on any mailto: link and select "Send Resume via Emurse.com" . It'll then open a new tab with Emurse, where you can log in, then you'll be at the Send tab with the e-mail prefilled out for you.

Any ideas on other ways to improve? We'll slowly be building out an API and dropping little nuggets here and there on how to implement things. It's fun.

Templates:

We're testing some new templates. If you have a resume design you're really itching to see, send it my way (alex at emurse dot com) and I'll see what I can do.

Links:

• C|Net's Top Ten Websites for Students: An 'honorable mention' of sorts for Online Apps. Check #7, which was Google. Underneath you'll see "More Online Apps:" with Emurse listed. A small victory, but personally very satisfying. Our idea is being validated more and more on mainstream levels. If you're a student using emurse, contact me, let's chat.
  
• Chris Finke on word of mouth: Thank god we didn't go with the original name.. DoodleKaboobleRezzy.li.ciousr ;)
  

As you may have noticed (or read about over on Jason's blog), we pushed through a slew of changes the last couple of days. I'll briefly touch on them, and kind of outline the work that's immediately in front of us.

New Stuff

• Advertisements - The big blocky crazy distracting ones in the middle of lists? On comments and story pages? Yeah, those are gone. Replaced with clean, crisp, google adsense. Hopefully this will be a nice compromise. Andy is our designer, and is the man, by the way. He's been tackling most of the ad issues.
  
• Frame Navigator - We weren't lying when we said it was something we planned to make optional. All the outrage from the technical crowd quickly made it a priority though. Shout out to Tom for getting it in over the weekend!
• Votes - Lots of little issues with votes, so allow me to get geeky for a second. We have servers. Lots and lots of servers. They're in multiple cities. Users are using different servers, talking to different databases, and pulling from different banks of cache (for now at least, each region has it's own distributed cache shared between servers). Each page load you make, things get cached and stored in memory -- this technique drastically reduces our database calls. Here's where it gets tricky. In some circumstances, we're caching the entire page, in others, only portions of the page. How do you keep the votes outside of what's cached, cached seperately so your not making a ton of unnecessary database calls, and distributed in a way where they won't fluctuate between servers? Now toss in ajax calls every 15 seconds that refresh the vote totals (sit on the page, and you'll see the votes change). I think we have this issue nixed, but we've only rolled it on in one specific place on the page -- the main list of stories. We can use this to monitor what's going on and test. If it appears to be working correctly now, we'll roll it out to the rest of the site. The other places should be accurate to roughly a minute or so. I can assure you though, all votes are being counted. It's just a display problem that we're working on.
• Formula changes - Part of the beta process is to figure out the right speed for the front page. We're not digg, we're a portal. We operate on similar principles, but we have a different user base and different traffic requirements. First, the formula was too slow -- the AOL copies Digg story stayed on the front page for days, which, if you're a fellow fan of irony, is simply rad. On the other hand, it's still "old news" in terms of the life of the story. Then we went to fast, and everything on the front page only had a few votes. Part of this is low traffic, part of it is the speed of the page changes. We're getting close though, lots of little tweaks -- Trey Long, just like Bow Wow, is a man amongst men. Even if he does prefer to be called "Baby Trey."
  
• Lots of little bugs: We had a crazy little bug on the comments page that would remove focus inappropriately as you were typing, we had a js error on vote handling that would show up from time to time, we had some advertisement bleed through that andy nixed, Craig introduced elements of formatting into Comments which I'm sure people will be thankful for, and a bunch of other stuff that I can't immediately think of..
  

Other stuff thats a couple steps behind...

• User suggestions - Most of the "cool" visible stuff will probably be based on user feedback -- we get a ton of it, and we read it all. When you log in, in the top right corner, there should be a "feedback" button. Use it and let us know what your thoughts are :) I'd still like to make the "pop up new window" thing an option, but depends on how loud people are about it.
  
• Better, more scalable multi-city approach - Craig's got some cool stuff prototyped in dev that should help us distribute this thing all over the US. What this means is faster response times and the ability to handle the onslaught of traffic thats heading our way when we switch to the full domain. The difficulty isn't so much in the premise of it, but in coordinating all the different folks that need to be involved.
  
• Better vote display - As noted in the above.. I'm hoping to roll out my crazy ass vote stuff all over the place.
• Other possibilities - If we can get the fires under control, we might be able to get Anchor Chat finished and online. The prototype in dev is, quite simply, friggin' amazing. Mad props to Christoph, Andy, Tom and Trey on it. They've done well.