Over the past few months we’ve been hard at work on a redesign of FreshBooks. Don’t panic—the app will work the same way, we just wanted to achieve a higher standard with our aesthetics… to some degree, FreshBooks the app has always had a year 2003 feel to it, and it’s high time we brought FreshBooks up to date.

The following are a series of screenshots highlighting some of the changes—they’ll be rolled out soon:

Navigation Simplification

As these “before and after” pictures indicate, we’re making a move to a more traditional tabbed navigation. This will simplify the FreshBooks experience and make it easier to navigate the app, and it allows us to ensure the navigation is more contextualized. For those of you who are power users, we’ve worked hard to keep frequently used links ever-present, so FreshBooks is still fast fast fast and you can get where you need in the fewest number of clicks.

Better Notification Messaging

For a long time now I’ve wanted to tidy up our error messaging. With our upcoming release our messages will be better—much better. You might think this is a small thing, but we’re guessing you will find it’s a pretty big deal.

Colour Picker Redesign

The picture pretty much says it all. This colour picker is way easier to use and it’s dynamic so you get instant feedback. We’ve included more samples too. In a word: magic.

Tidy Page Numbering

Since they are not primary navigation items, we’ve toned down the page numbering to make the links pop out less (i.e. classic blue links really pop out on white) . We also used CSS to make the clickable area larger for the page numbers, which in turns make it easier to click on a number (design note: a one letter text link is never ideal and that is what we were using before).

What Else is New?

Under the hood this signifies our move to CSS/XHTML with the application—standard stuff these days, but a big move for an application designed in 2003 when this was not especially common. So our pages are leaner and tighter, and we’re also taking better advantage of compression technologies which have reduced our average page size to about 1/3 of what they are today, so you can expect faster page loading.

As you can see the app has a new, fresher feel thanks to this redesign. We’ve affectionately titled this release “Sexy Beast” and it’s going to be easier to use for first-time visitors and less cluttered for regular users. This release will include more changes than I have outlined here, and as usual you can expect a steady stream of continuous improvement thereafter—it’s the FreshBooks way! We’ll send an email just before the release like we always do. We hope you enjoy it.

When you are in business, it’s really important to be able to tell your story well—it’s both an art and a science. To do this effectively, I find it helpful to have a good verbal logo.

The key to a verbal logo is to focus on the benefits—not the features—of what you do. For example, when people ask me “what do you do?”, I could say, ”I help run an online bookkeeping service,” but that doesn’t really compel the average cocktail party guest to ask more, does it? What I say instead is, “I’m in the business of saving people time,” and that never fails to hook people… they are inevitably compelled to ask, “geez… how do you do that?” And once you have people curious I find the conversation has a lot more momentum… and once you have momentum your correspondent will indulge you with their attention and their time and you’ll have the opportunity to describe what you do in Technicolor. Once you can do that you’ll be remembered for sure, and chances are whomever you are talking to will be well enough informed to refer people to what you do—and that’s when you know you’ve hit it out of the park.

Depending on my mood and the company I’m keeping, my verbal logo tends to vary and that makes things fun for me.

So… what’s your verbal logo?

Introducing AideRSS.

A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting the folks behind AideRSS, a truly amazing new tool for bloggers based in nearby Waterloo, Ontario. With AideRSS, you can just plug in the address of your blog and it tells you very quickly how much buzz you’ve generated. Think how useful this is: you can quickly determine who is saying what about you, where, and how much. Figure out at a glance what rocks your audience, and what bores them to death.

Give it a whirl. Here are a few examples:

Ilya Grigorik and Kevin Thomason were kind enough to invite me into the beta last week, and I have been waiting impatiently for them to go public so I can tell you about it.

Well, this past Tuesday, they launched. So I want to highlight some things that are particularly awesome.

A masterpiece of clarity.

Nothing about AideRSS is confusing. Everything about it is charming. It didn’t take long before half the company were huddled around my desk looking out how our blog was performing. The essence of its appeal is that it doesn’t take more than 1 second for anyone to understand exactly what to do, and what it’s good for.

Start at the beginning.

Let’s start with the clean design of the front page. Look how well balanced it is. The elements on the page are well separated and obvious. The description of the product at the bottom is cleanly segmented into Features, Benefits, and Video tours. The call to action is obvious. Type a blog URL and click Analyze!

Where I spend too much time a day.

The analysis is clean, direct, and uncomplicated. First, they quickly segment the blog posts into quartiles, and they use nice, simple visual cues like the bolder the colour, the higher the quartile. Second, they make it easy to figure out which posts are outperforming others with their nifty sortable table. Third, their PostRank system is fantastic at quickly visually identifying which posts are hot and which are not.

Let’s hear that noise!

The real benefit is that AideRSS subscribes to all the services that track blog conversations, and then organizes them in a handy table. This saves so much time tracking down who is saying what about you, and where. In this case, it is showing comments on our own blog, and impact on Technorati, Bloglines, and Digg. Just click on the little logos to swim in the sea of buzz your latest musings on cat pictures generated.

Why it matters to me.

For someone who is entrusted with the health of the FreshBooks blog, AideRSS is really my new favourite tool. The cold hard reality of this gig is I need to demonstrate that we’re saying what people care about. While FeedBurner gives me readership, AideRSS measures impact, and that is powerful stuff.

I’m a Lewis Caroll fan. I’ve always wanted to follow Alice and jump through the looking glass. I discovered something this morning that may be my best chance yet. An enterprising lad named Edgar has posted a job offer to any plucky freelance developers:

I am looking for a site similar to http://www.freshbooks.com/ Please register to the site and do a tour of the site and what it can do. Please note that I would need original work due to copyright issues.

I’m not sure what to tell my parents. Why did I sign onto a company whose current valuations, according to ScriptLance, range from $1000 to $5200 USD?

I was happy to chuckle and move on with my life, but fellow FreshBooker, Ben, posed an interesting question. Aren’t you ever curious what you’d get back from one of these clone shops? What if we raised a few grand just to see what would come back?

Anyone willing to pitch in a couple bucks?