You may or may not already know that I'm currently making a webstats suite for my 2nd year computing coursework. The plan all along has been to not only get a decent grade (hopefully ) in my computing A-level but also to sell the script afterwards. I'm not going to be modest about it, I think this script will be worth a LOT of money. Considering how much companies spend on webstats packages that have under half the features mine will have I reckon it could sell for up to about £1000 a time if I'm lucky. I'm trying to figure out the best way to sell it though. Should I try and find a company to sell it through giving them a cut of the profit? Should I just try to sell the whole thing to a PHP development company for them to sell and modify as they like?
My suggestion is find smaller web-based companies to sell your product for a smaller-than-corporate piece of the pie. For example, think of a small web-design company that caters to large companies, and for an added price per month they can use this webstat program. Meaning they can either sell a license of the software to the company, or they can buy a license each time they use it on a different client. (maybe give a free license to the web design company so they can test it out) hmmm... who to start with.... ah! My card: www.woventhorns.com Email me at chris_5fe_5 ~@t~ hotmail.com (since we shouldn't really be doing business on the forums!)
I'd agree with 117 about getting other people to resell licences rather than try to do it yourself. If you go for the latter option then you have advertising, hosting, payments to contend with, not to mention the issue of piracy. You can, as I'm sure you know, encrypt PHP code nowadays but that isn't particularly affective afaik. Good luck anyhow.
And don't forget to invest in the Zend Encoder (or a similar product) so you can distribute it without the source code to protect your work.
Unfortunately if your university finds out that you are selling software they can sue. In the majority of British unis every piece of work you do belongs to them
He's doing A-levels not a degree - I don't know if the same applies with schools / 6th form colleges...
Well my teacher's told me about a couple of previous students that sold their coursework so I can't see there will be a problem.
Well I'm not 100% on the features of awstats, but here's a few of the good things about mine: - Custom graphs/pie charts with a gui to build the query - Browser/OS detection from over 1500 browsers/OSes/bots/crawlers - Resolves IP to country - Primary language detection (independant of the country) - Tracking across pages - Allows for arguments to be specified as part of the page (eg. index.php?page=home and index.php?page=reviews could be treated as seperate) - Detects screen resolution and colour depth - Integrates via PHP/ASP/SSI (any other server-side language that allows file inclusion) or via an image using plain HTML with no javascript - Small database size - All the PHP and/or MySQL can be located externally on another server
I'm 99% sure awstats (I just mention awstats since it's what I use) does most of that. That is actually something that's lacking from the majority of off the shell stats packages, and you've done well to include it. From the way you describe it, it sounds as if you have to include code on any page you want logging, and it uses it's own database. awstats and many others like it work with the logs the server keeps anyhow, so overhead isn't a big deal. awstats is free, btw. If you make money out of this, more power to ya, but I just thought I'd give you a heads up on the stuff that's already out there, is free, and does the job very well. Good luck
Yep, I know there are things out there that take their data from Apache logs and such, but I'm aiming to include all the features I could possibly think of here, and that means including a file to get a lot of the information. However, the execution time of the data harvester is generally under 0.1 seconds at the moment and it's currently just bodged together so I can have as much data as possible to test it with. Does AWStats really have a custom graph builder? AFAIK that's a unique feature of my script. Basically the user will be able to do things like show a percentage for each page the users go to after a certain other page and limit it to a certain time-band, country, language etc etc or a combination. It will also allow for plotting two sets of data on one graph to see correlation. I've been working on the graphing engine just now and have currently got it drawing the axis' and axis labels as well as spacing them properly to allow room for all the value labels. Oh yeah, and graphs will also be storable as either static or dynamic. Which is just an image file, or a description file so the graph can be revisited quickly whenever they want. I'll also be implementing a thing much like the Windows XP start menu with the graphs, whereby the 8 or so most commonly viewed ones are available with 1 click from when they login. Maybe I'm being a bit unrealistic thinking I'll sell this script, I don't know. But from what I can see it will be more versatile than any other stats packages around. I suppose it'll always help me get a job anyway, plus I could modify it and sell it to sites as a monthly-fee type service hosted on a central server.
hmmmm, thats alot of money i douybt there would be a great dela of people who can afford that - youd be targeting companys which earn over like 50k a year! :-/ (thats profit, not net). Im starting a little thing where i code websites for people, and ill include a stats thing for like £20 - and thats only because itll comne with loads of documentation, customisable features and tech support for like 5 years afterwards as for people stealing my scripts without paying im building a feature into one of my perl apps which deletes all the scrips on the server made by me and emails the databse to me - so then i can say to them "you get you DB and files back when i get my money!". "thatll teach them" - ill trell myself!
Yeah, I would definately be targeting larger companies which would be why it might be better to sell it to a PHP developing company for them to sell on.
