As a little bonus for the tech crowd, I wanted to offer a little peek under the covers of our site to help the next bootstrapper facing a launch of a consumer facing site. One detail we all forget: we create these great sites and never teach anyone how to use them! Personally, I love screencast tours. Short of commentary and long on how-to, these little movies are worth 10,000 words. That said, how can you make them?

Well the short answer is buying some expensive tools. You can try to cobble a system together, but you will find some weird mis-matches. For example, most of the good capture tools are based on Macs. But if you want to address a consumer audience, you are stuck with Windows and IE. Face it! Okay, so we are stuck in Windows. The software I chose is Camtasia. It is basically an NLE-style movie program. Pretty basic and, as you would hope, they have great demos. A couple of rules of thumb:

• Keep them short! 3 minutes or less.
• Keep them focused. One thing at a time.
• Begin at the beginning.
• Use a real microphone!

Yes, sound is the #1 concern. It amazes me that amateur film makers and screencasters put so little effort here. If you can’t hear dialog, the whole experience is muddy. This does present a problem: how do you plug that microphone into a computer. Well for me on a Mac it was easy. But on a PC…well I’m still working on that. But I am hopeful I have a solution.

And if that works, you’ll be enjoying Key Ingredient screencasts very soon.