Business

Posts related to business, but not marketing.

eFront Lands in the Hot Seat

I’ve been researching LMS systems. We want a system we can move our training programs into, to make them more automated and publicly available, and to be able to charge for the courses and for software or template packs to accompany the courses.

We require a system that will allow us to automate the billing, control the delivery of the courses, and that allows content creation within the system, and not just attachments. It needed to either have a base template that was not embarrassing, or the ability to easily template it. It absolutely HAD to be an independent solution – I will not use a hosted solution for this. And it needed to be freely distributable, because otherwise it is not sustainable right now for us, or our target market to whom we might recommend it as a potential solution for them.

I’ve researched a LOT of them. Most are clunky, unintuitive, and ugly. Tested several, including Moodle, Atutor, Docebo and Dokeos. Dokeos and eFront were the only two to make it into the finals Moodle and Atutor were just too clunky, Docebo lacked functionality in key areas for our purpose. Dokeos bombed in the home stretch, unable to integrate with an effective billing system, though it was a serious contender in other areas.

Well, frankly, eFront doesn’t integrate with our billing either. Their instructions SHOW a PayPal module – but they don’t tell you up front that the PayPal module is only in the Education Edition (paid edition).

I chose it anyway, based on the option of a workaround. It allows the creation of user groups, to whom you can assign a course, and then a key code. Users can self-register, and if they have the right key code, can be automatically enrolled into specific courses. A bit of a round about way to do it, and a lot of extra work to set up groups for each course, but our Billing manager can issue a specific email for a specific product (also a lot of work to set up specific emails for each course), so we can make it work, and once it is set up, it oughta run fairly smoothly, and do the majority of the delivery work for us. Our billing manager can also deliver software packages or auto-installed companion site structures for specific lesson types, so the student has a practice ground. A definite advantage to this setup.

It is nice when you first get into eFront. Big friendly buttons, color and nice looking. Oh, that the elegance went all the way through. It really wasn’t very well thought out – It has all the earmarks of something that was very simple to begin with, and to which layers of function were added wherever the current programmer thought he could most easily work them in. It feels like planning broke down a few places along the way, or that it was first created and then coding standards and practices changed midway through. It is also obvious that it has been fairly extensively developed though – you don’t get this kind of function without a massive endeavor, so we are not belittling the effort.

It has been a trial figuring out just where to go to do things. The instructions are pretty brief (the only downloadable manual for the free version is a Quickstart manual, which runs through it so fast that it leaves skid marks on your eyeballs, and barely hints at the real process), and there is an assumption that you know what you want to do and what it is called, you just need to know where to do it, or that your idea of how to teach something will match with theirs. The learning curve has been needlessly high.

Yes, I did check the Wiki – it contains the same brief and rather unhelpful info that the Quickstart manual does. That is, it tells you everything you can learn by looking at the backend of the interface, but nothing that you really NEED to know, like what the heck to I do to get the thing to do that, or is there any way around the stupid dual login issue?

I also tried the forums – Gotta love those forums that stop you from searching “common” terms, and which are set to judge “common terms” by the ones that are used frequently on the forum. Hence, “student”, “list”, “course”, “module”, “lesson”, “category”, and any other word of value is blocked from the search. By this time you want to cover your head and scream in frustration.

Let’s see if I can give you a step by step on the process for creating a course, with lessons.

1. Create a category – if you want to categorize anything, you have to create a category to put them in – typical CMS type order here. If you don’t create categories, your courses are thrown helpfully into a default category which is unaccountably titled “Default Direction”…. Huh?!?

2. Create the Course. You select the Courses, click on New Course, and fill in a very simplified form. You save that, and then it shows you an extended form. They expect you to add any needed users here – you HAVE to add a professor. If you don’t, you’ll be limited in what you can do, because unlike most CMS systems and well-thought out systems, the administrator in eFront does NOT have access to everything. So, after you save this, you get thrown to the course list – clicking on the course name brings you back to this extended course form and where you control users and groups for the course.

3. Click a button next to the course name, to fill in details about the course – why this could not be in the extended form that you see right after you create the course, I do not know! Heck, why it could not all be in the New Course form initially, I don’t know!

4. Create a new lesson. Much like creating a course, first the short form, but things are in different places than with the courses. They’ve moved the users from being under the name link, to being under the gear tool icon (which means you are always clicking the wrong button somewhere to find them since it is inconsistent). You have to assign users to this also, they do NOT inherit them from the course, even if you say the lesson can only be accessed through a course and not independently. This time we have more buttons. One to fill in information about the lesson, one to set tools for the lesson. There is no way to set a global default for lessons, so if you wish to use a standard set of tools, you MUST enable them one by one for every lesson. And if you click the wrong area to look for where to change something, there is no graceful way to move from one area to another. You have to back out, and try again.

5. We just did the easy part… from here on out it gets more difficult. You can’t assign a course to a lesson. We now have to go back to the course, open it, and pick the lesson from the list of ALL lessons – and we can see that by the time we get even two or three courses completed we are going to have a VERY VERY long list of lessons with no sort options, and no categorization options.

6. We are now done where we are, even though we have done nothing more than create a framework and shell. The administrator can do nothing more. The administrator has no access to lesson contents. None.

7. We have to go to the front of the site, and login as a Professor. This will log us out as an admin. When we get there, we see that the lesson we set up is there, unless of course, we selected to allow access to it only through a course and we forgot to assign it to a course – in which case it won’t show up, even though the professor HAS been assigned to the course. If that happens, we have to logout, then log back in as admin, dig around to find the right screen to assign the lesson to the course, then logout, then log back in as Professor to continue. By now, I’m thinking that there are some serious usability issues.

8. Next, we get to create content. We click on the name of the course, and get a ton of things to choose from. Choosing the Content button presents us with three choices: Update Unit, Create Unit, Create SubUnit. Assuming that in order to add content one must put it inside a Unit (we now have four layers of structure), I create a unit. I am able to paste info in, but the editor has some bugs and issues. It doesn’t do special characters (though they do create some REALLY interesting effects if you try!), and it seems to be inconsistent about formatting, without the ability to firmly control it.

9. After saving the content, I find that I am stuck in the lesson. The top navigation is no help – the breadcrumbs don’t go all the way to the top, and clicking on Home, takes you back to the beginning ONLY for THAT LESSON. Finally I notice a text link at the bottom of the left column that says “change lesson”. I manage to find my way back to the lesson list.

10. At this point, I probably want to create another lesson for my course. But I’m logged in as a Professor. They can only create lesson content. They cannot create a course, or a lesson. I must logout, and log back in as Admin, and go create the lesson, jump through all those hoops, hope I don’t forget a silly thing buried somewhere that I forgot to look, and then logout, log back in as Professor, and create the lesson content. The limitations of the double login are serious – it means that NO SINGLE USABLE PROCESS can be completed through a single login! You MUST switch back and forth if you want to create the structure and the content. I find this a complete and total time waster, even for larger institutions that want control over some things at an admin and trainer level. It means that if you DO have two levels of management, they always have to be asking the other to do half the work. And if one step is missed on the Admin side, the Professor has to nag them and ask them to fix it before he can do ANYTHING of value. C’mon, who thought THIS was a good idea? And no way to change the permissioning! You are stuck in ridged roles with lines that cannot be crossed, and which make no sense for efficient management. This is VERY close to being a showstopper – and would be if there was any real alternative for the other functions we need.

11. The front of the site also leaves MUCH to be desired. All categories, courses, and lessons default to a standard (big, ugly and cumbersome) nested list which opens up Expanded. Category, Course, Lesson, all strung down the page in an unending list. I can collapse them after I am on the site, but I cannot tell the system to open with them collapsed. I cannot control the ORDER of the items in the list – so I cannot put the first courses first, or order the categories. For students who enroll in more than one course, this is going to create an annoyance REALLY FAST.

12. So after creating my courses, I am logged in as a Student (yes, there is a third login you have to maintain). It takes me several tries to get all the right boxes checked in the backend to see the classes as a student – each time having to switch logins. When it finally shows up, I am happy to see that it has a nice percentage completion box next to the individual lessons.

13. Navigating around the lessons as the student has the same unituitive issue that the Professor login has – it is not easy to find where to move from lesson to lesson. Students can mark a lesson as complete when they finish it. I do not see a completion bar for a course though – which would really be helpful to track overall progress through a full course. I can also see that there is a serious need to pretty up the lessons – they are, by default, big, plain, and uninspiring, rather like a cow in aspect, though lacking any chewing of cud. Images and colors will be needed in each lesson.

14. You can’t change the student navigation as far as I can see, without hacking the core. NOT GOOD! It is difficult to find where the bits of the lesson are – they are under different buttons. Who’s to know? It is completely unintuitive and inconsistent. It means the student has to explore several areas for each lesson – you can’t have them move through the lesson smoothly from point to point, and then to the test or project. They are compartmentalized in an obscure way. Many deadends, many confusing areas, or links that take you back somewhere other than where you expected to go, lots of obscure return links that are not clearly labeled. You end up just sort of fishing around over and over trying to get where you want to go, and the navigation keeps changing or disappearing – you go looking for what you want and get thrown somewhere you didn’t mean to go, and it ends up being a dead end with no way back and no way forward. Clicking a Return link can take you anywhere, but not necessarily where you wanted to go. And it isn’t easy to learn either. The rules about what takes you where are so inconsistent that even after messing around with the student area several times, I’m still confused as to how to navigate from lesson to lesson or course to course. I’m not a stupid person, I learn such things faster than average, so if I’m confused about it, there is a serious problem!

15. I had a tester run through the registration and enrollment, to take a course. He could not figure out how to move through the lessons. Again, not good, because you cannot control that workflow. It is what it is. This may end up being a show stopper. If the student has to take lessons on how to take lessons, then the program will be a colossal failure, especially if it is confusing enough that a simple explanation cannot clear things up!

16. My video is not showing up on the front of the site either – it is recognized in the back of the site, but does not play in the front of the site, and there is no link. Just a completely blank page. Will have to troubleshoot that.

Some other issues – the entire thing is coded so that you spend a lot of time watching the Loading message. It times out more frequently than other sites, and it is fairly resource intensive. It runs in shared hosting, but it isn’t happy about it.

The coding also means that if you have a page time out, and hit the Refresh button, it will send you back to the home page for the area you are in, rather than refreshing the screen you were on. It times out often enough that this has been a noticeable annoyance, and the navigation is confusing enough that each time it happens you have to figure out all over again how to get back to where you were.

I seem to be in another situation like I am with CRE Loaded. Being forced to use awkward software, because it is still the only thing that does what I need it to do. The Moodle folks out there will swear that Moodle does it all, but it was more of a hassle than eFront, after you get it installed you can’t even figure out where to go or what to do to get started, and it requires installing tons of modules just to get basic functionality that I require.

There are some things I like about eFront – It handles prerequisites (albeit awkwardly), and delivers quizzes or tests. It has the capability of delivering certificates, though the templates are absolutely apalling! A black box outline with Arial text in it is NOT sufficient. I’m not sure how flexible their RTF default formatting will be, but I’d be flat out humiliated to use the included templates!

I like the ability to group things in categories and subcategories, it helps me to create a large certification course which is made up of smaller modules that can be paid for independently.

It is easier to figure out than Moodle – I installed this yesterday, and I have the base configuration done, with 50 courses entered, and I am beginning to build lessons, two of which are completed with a third in progress (have to make a video for it). So I think that if I can divide the tasks, and create a completion list for each lesson in the Admin, to batch create lessons in the Admin, then login to the Prof login and batch create lesson content, I may be able to endure the hassle, though I still feel that over time it will be costly in lost time. I’m not sure if I can find a way around the frontend workflow issues.

Most LMS systems right now are either so immature they are not usable for flexible demands, or they are overkill – designed for universities, and not appropriate for a small business that wants to put training courses online to sell. In fact, it seems that this niche (which is a strong growth niche) is completely overlooked, though it is apparent from the forum posts that people are asking for it, and not getting it!

eFront seems to be the best of the lot at the moment, for our purposes, though I do hope long term they do something about the permissionings and workflow for creating lessons and courses, and the frontend workflow. If they do, they’ll have an enthusiastic endorsement from us, and it will be added to our list of Top Applications that are recommended to our clients and students.

I will post more on this later as I learn more, and am able to either MAKE it do what is needed, or run into problems which make it unsustainable.

UPDATE NOTE: I need to mention that their forums do receive responses. This is notable in the Open Source world, the developers seem to actually have their ear to the forums, and will respond to rational questions. In this area, they get an enthusiastic vote of approval.

If You’re Thinking 80/20, You’re Wasting Effort

Our company uses the “90/10 rule” instead of the “80/20 rule”.  Because we have discovered that if you choose the right 10%, it really does get 90% of the results.

If you are expecting only 80% of the results for 20% of the labor, then you are expending too much effort for too little result. You are doing things that don’t really matter, or doing them inefficiently, or you aren’t really paying attention to what IS getting the results.

We can create a “substantially equivalent” performance in a website, when creating a $5000 site that has to compete with a $50,000 site. You just gotta pick the right stuff, approach it with creativity, and not waste one bit of time, effort, or application. That’s 90% of the results, for just 10% of the cost, time, and effort.

I’ve found this to be true in other areas of life also. There just isn’t enough time in the day to do everything. You have to hit the most important stuff and let the rest go.

It ain’t slacking – and it isn’t doing a sloppy job. In fact, it means giving all you got to that 10%. But the results are so amazing that it really fires you up when you get it working right. Because you can produce so much, and just run circles around the competition.

It works in the home, it works in the office, and it works online.

If you really want to excel and be original, 80/20 just isn’t good enough.

Review of CRE Loaded 6.3 Pro and B2B

Late last fall, I was asked by a representative of CRE to do a review of CRE Loaded 6.3 B2B and Pro. It has taken some time to complete the reviews, due to the need to test out the functions in day to day usage situations. Even with multiple installs of the software running for various clients, we still have not tested everything, but we have tested enough to draw some conclusions and to see where the major changes have occurred.

I am pasting in the entire review here.

Published by
Laura Wheeler
Firelight Web Studio
(a division of Firelight Business Enterprises, Inc)
June 6, 2009

Copyright, 2009
Reprinting of this document is permissible ONLY if the entire document is published. Quotes may be extracted for online publication if a clearly labeled live link to the entire document is published directly below the quote.

CRELoaded Reviews

I have been very vocal about my opinion of the changes in CRELoaded 6.3 Standard, and I’m still a bit confused about why I was asked to review Pro and B2B. My opinion of them is not much gentler than my opinion of Standard, and in some ways, it is harsher, because of the pricing.

It has, in fact, taken MANY months to do this review. Because of a need to use it and actually test out functions in real-life situations. It is impossible to test a cart by looking at it, and most functions are not fully testable until you get them into real shopping demands. That takes time – hence the delay in releasing a useful review.

Even then, it is not comprehensive. There are features we were unable to fully test, because of a lack of demand for them.

I’ve already stated my opinions of the pricing structure, and the feature breakpoints, though I’m fairly certain that they were not read or listened to by anyone who could actually do anything about it.

I am striving in this review to be fair on both positives and negatives. Our clients use various versions of this software, and we depend upon it for some of our core service offerings.

Both Pro and B2B

I have long felt, based on experience with many carts, that CRE is the most flexible and sustainable option out there – not by a large margin, just on many carefully weighed points. Other options are either more complicated to deal with, or completely unsustainable for a number of reasons, or too immature to do what you need them to do. I still feel that way. But it does not mean that I think that CRE does not need work.

So here’s a quick rundown of the changes that I like, and those that I do not appreciate, along with things that should have changed but didn’t.

  • Infoboxes are more flexible to manage. You can position them up and down more easily without getting stuck in a section.

  • Design is harder to manage. Parts were put into the Admin, but since some bits are there, and some bits are still in the templates, it is very difficult to figure out where the change is that you want to make. And they are handled in more than one area in the Admin, further complicating the issue. It is very tedious to have to change the color of each infobox individually, especially when it is a slow and awkward process in the first place. We feel this was a step backward, not forward.

  • We are still having to fix bugs and adjust common elements to get the system to behave in commonly expected ways.

  • The installer still has the merchant account signup presented as a required part of registration. The link to skip it is small and not easily noticed.

  • The template sales in the site backend does not say who the credit card billing is originating from. This is a serious issue, making it seem shady.

  • I also dislike that many longstanding annoyances, inconveniences, and time wasters have not even been addressed. Most improvements were aimed at bells and whistles rather than core function.

  • This version has many things half-finished, or hidden goodies that are unpublished – they are not referred to in the documentation, and no instructions exist for using them. You may stumble on them, but have no idea what they actually are, or if they will work as you assume they logically should. I do not know if this happened because they were abandoned in the middle of them, or if the team did not have time to document them, or if they simply did not feel they were mature enough to want to have to support them.

  • We dislike the RSS feeds in the admin area. CRE’s server is perpetually overloaded, and those feeds can slow down the admin area of a site to the point of outright frustration, especially when combined with the clunky and redundant editing screens.

  • We also dislike the serial number validation methods. While we have no problem with CRE wanting to charge for the software, or wanting to require a serial number, validating it against CREs overloaded servers each time the site is logged into, is problematic for the end user, on a number of fronts.

B2B

Most of the B2B features work at some level, though figuring out how to use them is difficult. The manual is only partially helpful, since it only skims the surface. Many new features have been added which are not documented – some have cursory documentation stating the feature exists, others have no mention anywhere that they are even available, you may stumble on them, and then have to figure out what they do and how they work, or IF they work (many do not).

To me, the real value in B2B, and the only value worth upgrading for, has been the ability to create customer pricing groups – this is a functional feature which increases monetary potentials in measurable ways – most of the other features do not have that kind of return potential. This feature allows wholesale ordering capabilities to run alongside retail ordering. For many small merchants, this is a function that is difficult to find in a shopping cart. It still has some bugs and annoyances. Some are slated to be fixed in the next release, but there is no knowing whether that will actually be done, or WHEN it will be done, or how many new bugs will come with that.

Many of the annoyances have to do with how it is used – if you want to use all the features, you are in for some frustration. Many of the settings are straightforward, and logical. Others are buried in out of the way places, and require either extensive digging to find them, or someone has to tell you how to do it. Those that do work, often do so in a way that is crippled, offering only partial functionality.

The Affiliate program, which is only fully functional in the B2B version, is still too immature to be flexible enough to meet the needs of people who need a robust system. It works, but in a limited way. 6.3 does add some new functionality to it, and some if it very desirable (though undocumented), but it is still fairly simplistic as far as affiliate managers are concerned. It also has some longstanding issues of things simply not working, or being so inconvenient to access that actually using it is very irritating. The frontend links for this have always been broken, not going where they say they do, and the signup process is extremely unintuitive.

B2B ships with only a single template enabled. This is a serious limitation, in my opinion. CRE is fairly difficult to template, and while the templates for 6.2 were no great shakes, between the included templates, you could usually modify one to come up with something to work for most businesses. It is clear that the intent is that you purchase one instead.

Ok… but then that causes another problem, because at this time, templates that are compatible with 6.3 B2B are still very difficult to locate, and they are fairly costly when you do find them. Templates for content management systems are easy to find in the $35 to $50 range (and often free), but for CRE, they start at $135, and no other free ones are available. Hardly worth it when you’ll have to do as much coding on a purchased template as you would to modify the stock template. We have also found that many purchased templates introduce language file errors, and SQL errors when activating infoboxes, or activating other commonly needed functions.

The template that it ships with does have a couple of nice changes from the 6.2 templates. We like the horizontal menu, and the options on it, though the fact that it is hard coded into the mainpage file is unimpressive, to say the least. We’re not so crazy about the tiny links for contact page and policies page at the top and bottom of the page, and have removed them from many sites. We’ve pushed this single template into many shapes, and have done quite a bit with it, but it is more difficult to work with.

Pro

I know designers who think I am nuts for my opinion of Pro, but I’ve never seen the value in this. Not enough to pay for it anyway. It does offer some add-ons that generally cost something to get, but it does not have a significant value breakpoint for small businesses (our expertise is specifically with small business). There are things that make using it more convenient, but little that actually makes more money for the merchant.

I feel that CRE should have given Pro the more functional affiliate features of B2B, while reserving Customer Groups for B2B. This gives a clear monetary and functional advantage for each version.

Templating issues are the same as with B2B – limited, and very hard to find. In fact, Pro templates are harder to find than B2B templates.

When we agreed to test these and review them, I stated that I’d only do so if I could test them on actual client sites. I have been unable to do that with Pro, because I cannot find a client who wants even a free version, when they know they’d be locked into a long term pricing that was not justifiable. They want the function of B2B, but they do not perceive Pro as having enough difference over Standard to pay for it.

Support

Our clients who have attempted to access support have stated that it is “less than helpful”. Answers are often obscure, or the equivalent of the “beats me” shoulder shrug.

Since the documentation is lacking in anything other than descriptions of the obvious, the real problems are hard to find answers for. A search of the forums sometimes helps, but many questions remain unanswered there, and others are hard to find because the search function is so abysmal. It also appears that many of the older helpful answers have been removed – searches now fail to pull up useful information that was once available under the same search terms.

I believe strongly that good documentation is the solution to this – both for providing resources to the tech support personnel, and for providing resources to the customer base. Charge for it, but get it done, because the lack of usable instructions is a huge hindrance to the growth of CRE.

CRE in general

I am still unconvinced that the company will be reliable long term in how they treat their customers. I feel that there have been longstanding issues, which have existed from the beginning, which have never been addressed. Many would be simple things to correct, or which could be easily addressed by placing priorities in the right order. Most criticisms of CRE come back to the same things, over and over. Those problems have been serious impediments to the growth of the company.

Many techs have made a profession around CRE. They’ve been able to do so partly because there is very little in the way of real help or documentation. If you are gifted enough to figure it out, you can make money helping other people figure it out. But it means that techs who are just learning the business go and learn other systems first, and never bother with CRE. Once a tech adopts a system and begins to build services around it, they rarely change to others. CRE’s best chance of getting techs to adopt CRE and promote it, is to make instructions available which address the common issues, and make it easy to get helpful answers.

Setup and sustainability still remain awkward enough that do-it-yourselfers generally avoid it unless they are a techie at heart. Once a client is introduced to the backend of the site, they can usually manage it fairly simply, and can often figure out how to do basic tasks without specific instruction. Beyond that, the learning curve escalates.

Longstanding Problems Still Unresolved

  • The setup screens are awkward, and time wasting. Three clicks to do what you should be able to do in one click.

  • Affiliate links on front of site are inaccurate, signup is awkward.

  • Checkout process loses sales at a HIGH rate due to inefficient workflow.

  • Newsletter manager is buggy, and has no throttling. A serious issue that makes it completely unusable for most businesses.

  • Options and attributes are slow to set up, unintuitive, and clunky. And buggy, they often do not work.

  • Quantity pricing tables are buggy – same bugs they’ve had for many versions.

  • Links system is a spam trap.

  • Mainpage is stored in a file instead of the database.

  • Contact Us STILL has to be hand-edited in the language file.

  • Affiliate Terms still have to be edited in the language file.

  • Articles functions are still awkward, and unintuitive.

  • Still requires a shipping weight to charge any kind of shipping, whether weight based or not.

  • Updating the software is still very difficult, due to the number of items hard coded into language and other files, and due to the number of bugs requiring patching on each install. This is a MAJOR problem for business affordability.

  • Many other functions do not work, are awkward, or require bug fixes on every install. This is true in spite of the “bug fix” updates.

New Goodies

This is not a comprehensive list – just some things we noticed that are helpful.

  • Sort order on products – you can sort the product order more easily.

  • Default customer groups – Saves some time on setup.

  • Product/Article Blurb – Useful for category display.

  • SubProducts – designate at bottom of product listing

  • Article product linking at bottom of article – needs this on pages too.

  • Edit button on Products and Categories – makes product editing slightly faster.

Broken Features and Half Finished Elements

Again, not a comprehensive list, just some of the most obvious

  • Contact Us – They’ve created a Contact Us item in the Pages, but it does nothing. Contact Us page still has to be edited by hand.

  • Affiliate Branding – Half functional and annoying – affiliate info will show up on the front of the site, but the Admin has to enter the information in. There is no interface for the affiliate to do so. The site header also changes for affiliate branding, BUT, there is NO WAY to turn it off! You have to edit the code and remove the branding code, OR, put your header image in for EVERY AFFILIATE, in order to get it to consistently display YOUR header or logo.

  • One Page Checkout is buggy. Still.

Conclusion

Do I think that the new features are good? Some of them yes. The ones that work, and the ones that actually enhanced the usability.

Do I think that either Pro or B2B are worth the current price? No.

My primary reason is that the price is high largely to cover the cost of support which many people do not need, or which they’d gladly do without to get a lower price. And the support isn’t stellar, by any means.

I believe that the slow adoption of 6.3 in general speaks volumes of the reluctance that people have in using software that is priced this high, and which has the issues that it does.

I have always felt that CRE would be better off charging a lower price for the software, and charging separately for support. This makes sense from a business perspective – maximize the profit from replicatable things, while minimizing the revenue streams that are low profit but which are labor intensive.

Reducing sales by charging a high price that has a built in labor intensive factor, is purely stupid. Increasing sales by reducing the price for the items EVERYONE wants (and which are cheap to reproduce because they require less labor), and eliminating the built in labor intensive aspect, would be the intelligent course.

Offer a low priced option with NO support. Let it sell like hotcakes. Offer a separate support package and make the support division of the company self-sustaining.

Long term, CRE needs to focus on fixing bugs, and working out the longstanding problems which affect sustainability for businesses. The competition is already figuring this out, and is making strides toward that goal. CRE is still mired in old problems that are not even on the schedule to be fixed, but which every person who uses it is annoyed by.

The treasure is definitely there – but it is by no means refined.

————–

NOTE: Support was last tried about three or four months ago. All other comments reflect the status of updated 6.3 installs prior to 6.4.

The Loss of Group Conversation

I love a good forum – if that forum emails me when there are posts. I liked being able to post something of value, and get conversation about it. And I liked that the conversation was there, and searchable. I liked being able to ask a question, or brainstorm something, and get responses.

Ryze was one of the best venues to find forums like that – they call them “networks”. But Ryze is dying. It hasn’t been sudden, more of a trickle of attrition.

None of the new big networking sites can come close – their group conversation tools stink. And before you say, “what about Twitter?”, let me clarify – I’m talking REAL conversation, where you can make a comment of more than 140 characters, and where the comment lasts longer than the time it takes to scroll off the bottom of the stream of inanities that flood in.

Blogs don’t cut it either.

FaceBook has “groups”, and “pages”, but there is no notification on either the wall, or forum activity for those. It is like you join a group, and then it NEVER reaches out to you. The only way a group can tap you on the shoulder and get your attention is if the owner does a mass mail to the group. Too many of those, and people drop the group. So on FaceBook, groups really aren’t groups at all – they are just lists of people who never participate because there is nothing to remind them to take time from their busy lives to check in.

Statistically, forums that require you to check in to see if there has been any activity are failures. Stupidly, FaceBook has never figured this out.

But then, neither did FastPitch, LinkedIn, or any of the other major platforms that I checked out. I think they like transience. It takes smaller databases.

So group conversations that are meaningful have all but disappeared.

Sad, really.

And sadder… We downgraded our Ryze memberships today. With a sense of loss as we did so. We closed our own network there, and unsubscribed from some that have become either nothing more than questions about why there are no posts, or mostly ads – and one that has degenerated into mostly a commentary on Twitter (If I wanted Twitter, I’d be THERE, not somewhere else reading about it). The last people to go are the spammers, and a few die-hards who want to try to doggedly MAKE it what it once was.

Our profile is still there – it could come back. I don’t think it will. I give Ryze 6 months before they are forced to close their doors. And it is because they did not listen. They offer something nobody else does, and it has been successful, and is still valuable, but not without additional tools to entice people in to begin with, and to keep them there. And implementing the tools should not be difficult, the technology is readily available. Heck, I can do it using Open Source software! They could still pull out a spectacular recovery. But I think they won’t.

And the loss is more than just a venue… It seems the loss of what they did that no one else has had the intelligence to implement in a smart way.

A Scathing Report on Grant Writer’s Institute

Ok, this is not something I want to do. I like to believe in the good intentions of people. And I rarely feel the need to write an article solely for the purpose of exposing a business that acts in a way that I can only consider to be highly unethical.

Grant Writer’s Institute, which goes under several other names as well, has been promoting our grant to the people whom they are charging hundreds of dollars for something that is quite a bit less than they are encouraging people to believe that it is. They provide an information packet that supposedly contains information on grants that business owners can get to fund business expansion or startup. They have added us to their list, and we are being contacted regularly now by people who have been taken by this company. We have been contacted directly by three people, and have had applications submitted by others. The three people we were contacted by all reported how useless the information was that they were given, and that it was misleading and incomplete about the reality of actually GETTING a grant.

They operate on the fine edge of legality. They word their information carefully, so the eager applicant will THINK they are getting something they are not. They are not picky about the “grants” they recommend – some are actually contests, not grants (and there is a huge difference). Some require fees to apply. Ours is not money, and they represent it as such – it is clear they have never even read our site beyond the word “grant”.

We received an application, which some guy apparently paid them to prepare.

  • Now, in the first place, our application can be prepared by ANY qualified candidate – if you can’t prepare your own grant application for our program, you are not qualified to operate a business!
  • In the second place, the job this company did on preparing it was appalling.

It was obviously prepared by someone who did not speak English natively. To their credit, they did conceal it well, but there were inconsistent phrases which gave it away. This is something a professional company would have paid more attention to.

They did NOTHING to help this person to actually appear qualified. It was patently obvious that they just wrote down whatever he said – even the things that were redundant, and a bit rambling. They did not help him actually present his information in a way that would help him qualify for the grant. The information presented is in fact completely unsuitable, because there is nothing in it which even outlines a viable business concept. It is completely unoriginal, and the business, as outlined, would have no chance of succeeding.

This company is NOT a professional grant writing company! They lack the most basic skills in presenting grant application information in a way that will help an applicant actually GET an award. They take money while representing themselves as such, but the kind of work they did on this grant application suggests that they are not concerned about whether you actually get the grant. They do not appear to be concerned about learning what the requirements of the grant are – no one from their company has so much as ASKED us for any of the judging criteria (and a good grant writer would do that), and they clearly did NOT read the available information about our grant requirements, or they would have done a better job.

A real grant writer looks at many factors – the grant requirements, the likely judging criteria, the competition level for the grant, and the best way to present the information given so that it meets those requirements. They will recommend wording things in a way that presents them in their best light. They will outline the value and feasibility of a proposed project, and they will detail the greater good of the project.

There was no effort whatever in this application toward actually helping this person GET the grant. The job they did could have been done better by a high school student.

The information I am presenting here is documented, and can be legally proven in a court of law. I am not committing libel – I can prove what I say. We have the applications, we have the witnesses.

  • Avoid this company, and all of their affiliations.
  • Do not EVER pay more than the cost of an average priced book for ANY kind of grant listings. And be careful even with those!
  • If you can afford to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for grant information, you can afford to bootstrap a business. It does not take much to do so, as long as you are willing to work and be creative.

I am sorry to have to write this. I’m sick of having to explain to people the reality of grants – and seeing a company like this just makes me ill. It will eventually catch up with them – you can’t do this much harm over and over without it eventually coming back at you.

Right now I’m torn – I can seek legal help in making these people stop using our grant in their listings. But if we do that, we lose the ability to build a potential case against them. We also lose our ability to advise the people they are harming on what possible redress they might seek. So I haven’t yet decided exactly what to do, other than publishing what I know, and sounding warnings far and near.

If any legal entity or reporter wishes to pursue this, we will cooperate fully, but we will not release applications, or contact names without permission of the applicants, or a court order, pursuant to our privacy terms.

A Tale of Two Cities

We market into two towns in our area. We are located in a dinky town, population of just 300. So there really is no customer base for our services here. We have spent a lot of time marketing into two counties – the one we live in, and the one next door where we shop the most. They are very different towns.

Neither has yielded much in the way of business, but the quality of the business and the relationships is quite different. Over the years, we have tried to do things within the county we live in, but it has proven to be a hopeless effort! They do not want to progress, and the attitudes of the business owners have been unproductive to to work with.

Wyoming is a distinctively different place to live and work anyway. People love it or hate it. We love a lot of it, deplore other aspects. The complacency drives us nuts sometimes. The high alcohol and drug use rates are beyond apalling. But the day to day interactions are often difficult, and frequently painful. It has brought me to the point of wondering whether we are making an effort that may have a positive effect in the long term if we just keep trying in spite of opposition, or whether we are just wasting time poking ourselves in the eye.

In our home county, EVERY business prospect has been twice as hard to get, and twice as much trouble once we got them. Petty politics and power plays become an issue, and cause all sorts of grief. In the last two months, we’ve been insulted, verbally abused, accused of failure to honor a contract (in one case where the entity wanted more for their money when already receiving 50% discounts on rates that are far below industry averages, and in another case because we refused to do all of the work for Phase 2 in a contract in the Phase 1 payment period!). One was salvageable, the other was not, and it was a relief to see it go, though hard, because one of the main instigators is someone who had posed as a friend for a period of about three years.

I think I am just tired of working so hard to try to help people locally, only to have it blow up on me. We are contemplating seriously just dropping our two Chamber memberships in the county we live in, and only maintaining the one in the nearby county. One has profited us, the other two have not really. It is a sad thing to come to the conclusion that you have to give up on an entire area though. Because it is about more than just business – it is about community, and attitude, and direction, and progress.

Our membership in the Chamber in the other community has been productive. It has resulted in teaching engagements, new contracts, and reciprocity. This has been far from the case in the other two towns – one is a nice, though tiny, area. But it has that quality that many small tourist areas do – they will welcome you on the surface, but you really won’t be part of them until you have lived there 40 years. The other has been completely a waste of time. A sense of normality on the surface, but no ability to make progress. Every effort is like rowing upstream.

By withdrawing from the community we will potentially lose $25 per month in income. That is $25 per month that is hard to get actually PAID, and which takes more time than most of our maintenance agreements for the same amount.

It still surprises me how communities can be so different. And how people just seem to take on the skin of the community they adopt, whether intentionally or not.

I’m not entirely sure where we’ll be going with this. But I do know that something has changed in me. I’m just not sure how it is going to come out in action yet.

The 90/10 Rule for Small Business – Webmaster Secret #4

For small businesses especially, websites tend to operate on the 90/10 rule. That is:

90% of the results come from 10% of the work and expense.

This is especially true of SEO, and of site functions, but also applies to design, copywriting, and to a certain extent, to marketing.

So when we begin a contract, we don’t try to do it all. We try to determine the 10% that will get the most results, and we include anything that is critical for their industry or site concept.

This 10% will vary from site to site – there are no two the same. So it takes careful thought and planning for each site, and a thorough understanding of the challenges and needs of their industry to get it right.

Use of this rule has been a huge factor in our success. It is a primary aspect in achieving our goal of delivering higher quality, better performance, lower prices, while still maintaining higher profits for ourselves. It sort of makes the impossible, possible.

When you understand that certain things make sense for big business, but do not scale for small business, and in fact, give no real benefit to a small business startup, you then give yourself permission to not do them, and to understand that it is BETTER to not do them. At the same time, when you understand that other things, typically not included in a corporate contract, are absolutely ESSENTIAL for small business. We are not operating by corporate website standards – we are creating new standards that work better for small businesses specifically.

If it does not contribute to the profit of the site, then it isn’t part of the 10% that we include in a contract, unless a client requests it specifically – in which case we charge more.

The miraculous result of this is that we can take a $50k site, and deliver substantially equivalent performance for under $5k. The site owner can get in the door, develop a successful web presence, and then improve gradually from there – slowly adding those other touches that cost more, but which bring lower returns. 90% performance is typically more than enough to launch a successful business and get it rolling so that it can earn enough to support further enhancements.

But only if you choose the RIGHT 10%, and get the RIGHT 90% of the performance.

Can You Do it for $20?

A prospective client asked me that yesterday. I said no… Our price is $25.

Sometimes I say yes. This time I didn’t.

He then said, “Some other companies say they can do maintenance and hosting for $20.”

I replied, “They cannot do for $20 what we do for $25, and we cannot do this for $20.”

Sometimes I come down in price – we sometimes have a little wiggle room, we sometimes are able to negotiate with a client to reduce services that they do not need as much, or we sometimes can see that a particular job will be worth doing and will pay us back if we come down on one price.

But this time I could not. This particular service is already stretched to be able to offer it at $25 per month. And it offers a ton of value. To come down would mean running into problems as we overstretched ourselves.

I have always had the confidence to say no when I knew I could not come down on a price. But this is one of the first times I have been able to boldly say that the value made it worth it – and it honestly does make it worth it. That felt good. I recommend trying it!

If you have thought out your prices, and there is wiggle room, there is nothing wrong with negotiating. If there isn’t though, sometimes you just can’t do it. When you can’t, it is easier to be bold when you know your prices are worth the value.

If you are destitute and have more time than money, you have nothing to lose by coming down even when you know it is worth more (and sometimes we do so for reasons of kindness – when we choose to help someone out). But if you are in a position where doing so will cost you over time, it isn’t wise to do so, especially in situations where the client can probably afford it if they understand the value.

The Nameless Faceless Merchant

“Please”, she said, “I don’t want my home address on my website. My husband is in law enforcement, and I don’t want people to be able to locate us.” I suggested she have a Post Office Box. “No”, that was an extra expense, she didn’t want that. Just a store, with a shopping cart.

“No name on my site” another client said. Competing with large faceless corporations, her only advantage was being personal, and she did not want her name public.

Many of our clients buy into the myth that Private Domain registration is a good thing.

In this highly competitive market, all of these are fatal. Consider:

If you are a small company, people want to know who is behind it. You can rely on your reputation like Dell and Wal-Mart. You have to give them some idea of who you are. Your name is essential. Your reputation is more about YOU than about your company name. Someone needs to be able to Google you and learn enough about you to know if they trust you, or at least read a bit to see if they think you are someone they might want to do business with. This is especially important when competing with large and impersonal corporations – being someone approachable is your only advantage.

Paranoia about your name being on the web is not a valid reason to keep it off your website. It is already out there. Not using it on your website won’t make one bit of difference to anything except your ability to sell. If you are going to have a business, this is the cost of doing business. Because frankly, a website without a name has only the minutest chance of every serving the purpose of helping you earn.

You MUST have a mailing address. Even a post office box. If a customer has no place where they can serve papers in the event of a dispute, then they won’t buy!

Private Domain registration has been used by every scammer in the world. If you use it, you look like one of them. Besides, it doesn’t really protect you, does your business more harm than good, and can potentially cause some very serious problems.

If there are three merchants on the street, two whose faces you can see, and a third who wears a mask, who will you buy from?

Web business requires the maximum degree of possible transparency. You don’t have to post pictures of yoru kids or give your home address. But you have to have a name, and a mailing address, and as much validation of those as you can get. Without them, you are wasting your time and money.

There Are No Fireflies in Wyoming

In the book, the family crossed Wyoming, and stopped to camp one night and caught fireflies. The author could not have known… It was obvious she had never been here, or if she had, she had not noticed that one thing. Because Wyoming has no fireflies. Plenty of mosquitoes… none of which have lights on the end. Of course, if you grew up where fireflies were a common thing, you might never realize that someplace else did not have them!

It is details like that which only those who DO know will notice. But when they do, you lose all credibility!

This is pretty important if you write for a living. But I think there is a broader application also. We often make assumptions based on our own background and experience, and never realize that they may not be accurate for other situations.

We may make assumptions that are incorrect in client negotiations, in assessing an unfamiliar target market, or in networking situations. They can be embarrassing, or even disastrous for our business.

Sometimes we make those assumptions about our own skills or expertise, due to lack of experience, and end up muffing the job. That is REALLY embarrassing.

The most important thing that experience teaches us in this regard, is to not assume things, to research more carefully, so we don’t try to catch fireflies in Wyoming.

Why Would ANYONE Judge VALUE Based on Hourly Pricing Alone?

About a week ago an overseas outsourcing company contacted me through a venue that I frequent. Since I was looking for a coder for a specific database conversion project, I asked them for a quote – they had told me that it could be done for $10 per hour. I send them the two databases, along with instructions about what needed to be done. I knew it would take me about 5-6 hours to do it. It was not work I liked doing, so I was interested in outsourcing it.

Their quote came back for 24 hours of work, at $360. Hmmm. That isn’t $10 per hour…. And it is more than triple the maximum amount of time that I’d allote to the project.

I then contacted a regional coder – she charges $85 per hour. Ouch! That is a LOT compared to $10 per hour! Or even $15!

But, she could do the work in 2-3 hours. Hmmm…. $170 to $255, instead of $360! Which one is the real bargain? Especially when you consider language, cultural, time zone, and legal recourse limitations.

Even when you are comparing local with local, hourly rates are just NOT a reasonable basis of comparison. The best way to judge, is to ask for a list of included services, and a flat rate, or at least a firm estimate. Any experienced professional can give that, and a newbie can still offer reasonable guarantees that it won’t go over a certain amount.

Often, higher hourly rates pay for the following:

1. Reduced legal recourse risk. It is easier to recover from people who are within the same country as you, or who are in a country that has reciprocal agreements with your country.

2. Easier communication – time zones, language and cultural differences, or inexperience on the part of the technician in communicating with clients can all cause communication barriers, which equate to lost time or poorly done work.

3. Better tools – Better tools mean better quality output, and faster work speeds. The right tools can shave hours off many kinds of tasks, so hourly rates become meaningless when you are trying to compare the cost of one service that is done manually, and one that is done with better tools to do it more efficiently.

4. More experience – this means both faster output speeds, AND better quality. But it also means that an experienced professional has knowledge of “gotchas” that might bite you if you work with someone who is less experienced. For example, in our industry, there are certain things that municipalities or non-profits of certain types have to do with their sites, or which they cannot do on their sites, which are different than the standards required by small businesses. Experience protects those entities from potential lawsuits.

5. More Accurate Applicable Charges – One company may charge for research time, if they lack experience in a certain area, another may not. One company may charge for negotiation time, another may not.

6. Less Lost Time – Higher quality and accuracy can be worth paying a higher hourly rate for, because it saves you in the long run. If a lower hourly rate means work has to be redone, it costs you even if you don’t have to pay for it directly.

7. Attention to Different Kinds of Details – Often higher hourly rates are charged for higher risk projects because there are more details to attend to. Simple projects do not require this, but complex ones may. Often, as a business grows, so do their risks, so a service level that was appropriate for a startup may not be appropriate for a larger faster growing business. Higher risks almost always mean higher hourly rates, but they also result in more protection for the client.

There are MANY good companies who charge low rates. There are MANY new businseses and service providers who can do a very good job at a fair price. This is not in any way a condemnation of lower priced companies.

Rather, it is an encouragement to actually compare the REAL price, and the REAL VALUE rather than making a knee-jerk reaction based on the appearance of price, by using a number which is actually meaningless.

It would be like saying “A car that gets 35 MPG is better than a car that gets 12 MPG” without comparing anything else, like the reliability of the car, the size, the intended purpose, or even the side the steering wheel was located on!

Judge price and value based on factors that really matter, and you’ll find that what appears to be the lower price, often isn’t!

A Rant About Grants

Who spends $3000 to get information on getting grants, but will not invest that much into their business instead?

We’ve been getting grant applications lately from people who are TOTALLY unprepared to operate a business, and completely uncommitted to their business! How do we know? Because they have NOT done what is OBVIOUS to even TRY to start their business!

Instead, they have come to our website, filled out our grant application, and tried to persuade us that they are deserving of a business grant, when they have not done anything to even start their business. Not all of our applicants, but many of them.

Here is the reason I am so frustrated over this:

They are not even READING what the grant IS!

We are getting people who are asking for MONEY, even though our site clearly says, in many places, NO MONEY IS AWARDED.

Most of them do NOT need a website! Don’t even WANT a website, but since they did not read the grant information, they are clueless about what they are even applying for!

So these people, who want an offline business, which they could bootstrap if they were smart about it, are sitting there talking about their dream, applying for grants so someone else will give them their business. Most of them could get started if they’d just start doing something. Start small. Start bit by bit and work toward it. Do SOMETHING productive other than just running around looking for someone to fund it for you.

The great irony is that some of them have PAID MONEY (often a GREAT DEAL of money) for information on getting grants. In some cases, it was enough money that they could have started their business if they had been smart about what they spent it on.

It is peculiar to me that they will spend money on a supposed shortcut, but they will not spend the same amount of money on a more sure way of doing it.

So I’m puzzled at human nature today. If you just stick your hand out and expect it to be filled, no one will ever consider you to be deserving. You’ve gotta do what you are capable of doing. I am going to have to find a polite way of communicating to these people that they got taken on the grant information, and help them to understand what it takes to REALLY have a business.

‘Cause I ain’t going to hand you money. And I’m only gonna hand you a website if you’ve worked hard already and can indicate to me that you will actually do something worthwhile with it.

Grow a Garden!

Gardening doesn't have to be that hard! No matter where you live, no matter how difficult your circumstances, you CAN grow a successful garden.

Life from the Garden: Grow Your Own Food Anywhere Practical and low cost options for container gardening, sprouting, small yards, edible landscaping, winter gardening, shady yards, and help for people who are getting started too late. Plenty of tips to simplify, save on work and expense.

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