May 13, 2024 at 4:38 pm
Jeff Moden wrote:@steve-2 :
I guess my question would be, what are the marketing stats for the site? Perhaps a bit of understanding there would help us shape our requests to the marketing department.
I'm not sure myself, and I don't know that there is a clear set of marketing values/goals here. There are certainly some people who don't appreciate or value the site. There are others who aren't sure of value.
Marketing isn't a thing here, it's dozens of people, most of whom don't have any idea. My advice is to press from your side what value you've gotten from the site, or where you've helped others, and also give them your impression of Redgate based on the site. Good or bad.
I am searching for some WordPress consultants, as I do have some budget. The challenge is figuring out how and what to work on and can they actually get something done relatively quickly.
I guess I don't understand... you cited the marketing email address for us to write to. Should we be targeting the WebMaster email address instead?
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
May 13, 2024 at 4:41 pm
Bump post to get my message to show up because it's the first post on a new page. 🙁
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
May 13, 2024 at 7:53 pm
sales@ or marketing@ might get better traction. We have someone monitoring the webmaster email, but not 100% sure they'd do much more than send the emails to me.
May 14, 2024 at 12:18 am
sales@ or marketing@ might get better traction. We have someone monitoring the webmaster email, but not 100% sure they'd do much more than send the emails to me.
What a conundrum... tons of good people have abandoned the site because of problems with the site and they don't listen to the guy they brought along with the purchase of the site for the sake of continuity and other advantages. What makes you think that the folks in Sales or Marketing would "make the connection"? And why haven't they cared since even before the change to WordPress? If we knew why they don't care, perhaps we could offer some reasons that might make them care.
It has to be "positive", though. We can't say that having a crap website is hurting their business (and I have seen it do so in 2 cases now) or they may kill the site like we've seen them so ruthlessly do on Simple-Talk and ASK SSC.
We need a little advice here please, Steve, because I'm thinking that Sales and Marketing aren't going to place any importance on the forums of SSC.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
May 14, 2024 at 1:40 pm
... and honestly, from stats, very few people use this site on mobile. ...
Then why cater to the few? I think that is the point a lot of people have been trying to make here. If the vast majority don't use a mobile device to use this site, then why aren't we catering to those people instead of the few that do.
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we travel not to escape life but for life not to escape us
Don't fear failure, fear regret.
May 14, 2024 at 4:18 pm
Steve Jones - SSC Editor wrote:... and honestly, from stats, very few people use this site on mobile. ...
Then why cater to the few? I think that is the point a lot of people have been trying to make here. If the vast majority don't use a mobile device to use this site, then why aren't we catering to those people instead of the few that do.
We're not catering. We do want it to work on mobile, as I think lots of people will look at a post or check things. It works on mobile, but we're not going to spend a lot of time optimizing or resizing things. I would like the buttons to resize, but the breadcrumb still will stay because we're not producing a separate page(s) for the forums or articles on mobile.
May 14, 2024 at 4:25 pm
Steve Jones - SSC Editor wrote:sales@ or marketing@ might get better traction. We have someone monitoring the webmaster email, but not 100% sure they'd do much more than send the emails to me.
What a conundrum... tons of good people have abandoned the site because of problems with the site and they don't listen to the guy they brought along with the purchase of the site for the sake of continuity and other advantages. What makes you think that the folks in Sales or Marketing would "make the connection"? And why haven't they cared since even before the change to WordPress? If we knew why they don't care, perhaps we could offer some reasons that might make them care.
It has to be "positive", though. We can't say that having a crap website is hurting their business (and I have seen it do so in 2 cases now) or they may kill the site like we've seen them so ruthlessly do on Simple-Talk and ASK SSC.
We need a little advice here please, Steve, because I'm thinking that Sales and Marketing aren't going to place any importance on the forums of SSC.
I think adding pressure from you all is helpful because (as with many organizations), they want data from multiple sources to make a decision. They hear from me, they see some of these posts I send my boss, but getting more people to see/hear that you all care about the site helps. I think some frank honest thoughts, not emotional complaints or rants, but "I used to do this and I can't. This was helpful to me in the past, but it doesn't work well. There's a lot of whitespace, which makes it slower to find info, the constant post errors reduce the time I spent answering questions". Those types of practical, honest thoughts might help get things moving.
The move to WordPress came about because we were struggling for resources, and we didn't have a lot of C#/ASP.NET resources in house that work on websites. We did have people running WP for Simple Talk and RG.com, so the idea was things would be easier to fix. That hasn't proven to be the case, especially with the PASS Data Community Summit, which is more of a priority than this site.
I'd love to move back to a C# based system, but that's hard to maintain in a different way. When we've reached out to the BBPress people (Forum software), they find us to be one of the outliers (maybe the outlier) in size and scale, so they're less helpful as well.
I am trying to spec out some things to fix and see if I can get some budget for a consultant, but that's not an easy thing to do as there's a lot of scaffolding to set someone up and then merge in their code, plus the concerns about security/auth/etc.
I'm in the middle of a rough stretch of travel here, so I'm hoping you all can put some pressure on management here to raise the priority of SSC inside RG.
May 14, 2024 at 4:42 pm
"We do want it to work on mobile" <> " from stats, very few people use this site on mobile"
To me it would be like having a couple customers say if you had bean bags and dimmed the lights we like this restaurant better. Then getting rid of all of the tables and chairs and replacing them with bean bags and dimming the lights. The few would be happy, but you would drive away others that thought it wasn't functional.
You had a few say it would be great if this site worked on mobile and you sacrificed the functionality for the rest of the people.
-------------------------------------------------------------
we travel not to escape life but for life not to escape us
Don't fear failure, fear regret.
May 14, 2024 at 4:50 pm
Following on to what Steve said, when I'm doing sales & support work at Redgate, talking to clients, they'll say something like "You should do this with Product X". My response is always, "Please, submit that as a request." I'll get pushback, "What? They won't listen to me, but they'll listen to you." My response is always the same "Not really. See, I don't spend much money with the organization."
You're all in a similar spot. Steve & I are not the community, and we're unlikely to be listened to as such. You are, and are much more likely to be listened to.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
May 14, 2024 at 5:28 pm
"We do want it to work on mobile" <> " from stats, very few people use this site on mobile"
To me it would be like having a couple customers say if you had bean bags and dimmed the lights we like this restaurant better. Then getting rid of all of the tables and chairs and replacing them with bean bags and dimming the lights. The few would be happy, but you would drive away others that thought it wasn't functional.
You had a few say it would be great if this site worked on mobile and you sacrificed the functionality for the rest of the people.
That is a horrific analogy. We didn't get rid of things and replace them. The analogy would be that we added a few bean bags in the corner and lowered the lights above them.
We didn't sacrifice functionality for those mobile users. We included mobile as a feature in a very complex project. We mostly moved because we had expertise in WP. Having WP render on mobile was another tickbox being checked.
C'mon, you've all built software for others. There are always many requirements, many features, many compromises, and upgrades aren't perfect improvements without any drawbacks. If you've got that example, I'd love to see it, but every single time I change software, it's a mixed bag. Some things get better, some worse. Hopefully more of the former. This is no different than most other software apps people have rearchitected and changed.
May 14, 2024 at 6:11 pm
I sent this post on X:
https://twitter.com/rsterbal/status/1790436470181818647
Robert Sterbal 412-977-3526 call/text
@rsterbal
@redgate
Who should I reach out to for issues with the https://sqlservercentral.com forums? Is there a place to post and follow issues?
May 14, 2024 at 7:19 pm
below86 wrote:"We do want it to work on mobile" <> " from stats, very few people use this site on mobile"
To me it would be like having a couple customers say if you had bean bags and dimmed the lights we like this restaurant better. Then getting rid of all of the tables and chairs and replacing them with bean bags and dimming the lights. The few would be happy, but you would drive away others that thought it wasn't functional.
You had a few say it would be great if this site worked on mobile and you sacrificed the functionality for the rest of the people.
That is a horrific analogy. We didn't get rid of things and replace them. The analogy would be that we added a few bean bags in the corner and lowered the lights above them.
We didn't sacrifice functionality for those mobile users. We included mobile as a feature in a very complex project. We mostly moved because we had expertise in WP. Having WP render on mobile was another tickbox being checked.
C'mon, you've all built software for others. There are always many requirements, many features, many compromises, and upgrades aren't perfect improvements without any drawbacks. If you've got that example, I'd love to see it, but every single time I change software, it's a mixed bag. Some things get better, some worse. Hopefully more of the former. This is no different than most other software apps people have rearchitected and changed.
You changed the look and feel(functionality) to accommodate a few that drove away others. That was more my point.
Like I said before I will be here till I retire, still the best site out there, just sad we had to loose so many for this change.
-------------------------------------------------------------
we travel not to escape life but for life not to escape us
Don't fear failure, fear regret.
May 14, 2024 at 8:14 pm
We didn't change the look and feel to accommodate a few. If I gave you that impression, that's incorrect. I thought I posted above, but a few posts before this, I noted why we changed software.
We switched to WordPress because we have WordPress expertise in-house. Supposedly they would be able to work on the site and respond to bugs. We picked a forum add-in that supposedly would scale well and worked better than others. It had mobile support, but that wasn't the reason for the change. The old software had bugs as well, and I could never get anyone to work on it, because in our IT team, we don't have C# skills, at least not at a level that was confident to do this work.
The change to a newer design was a decision based on creating templates on WordPress. Plenty of people like the new design, plenty don't. I think that's hard to balance among a large audience. However, if we were back on an ASP.NET area, I might be able to alter things myself. As it is, learning to work with WP isn't on my list, though perhaps it should be.
May 14, 2024 at 11:33 pm
I sent this post on X:
https://twitter.com/rsterbal/status/1790436470181818647
Robert Sterbal 412-977-3526 call/text
@rsterbal
@redgate Who should I reach out to for issues with the https://sqlservercentral.com forums? Is there a place to post and follow issues?
We'll see what happens there, eh? The answer will probably be to post it on the forum on SSC for such problems. That's what I'm considering doing and, that way, other forum members could also get involved.
Again, though, we can't make it seem like any of this is hurting marketing or they're likely to dump it as like they did on Simple-Talk and, more recently, on ASK SSC.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
May 14, 2024 at 11:49 pm
Jeff Moden wrote:Steve Jones - SSC Editor wrote:sales@ or marketing@ might get better traction. We have someone monitoring the webmaster email, but not 100% sure they'd do much more than send the emails to me.
What a conundrum... tons of good people have abandoned the site because of problems with the site and they don't listen to the guy they brought along with the purchase of the site for the sake of continuity and other advantages. What makes you think that the folks in Sales or Marketing would "make the connection"? And why haven't they cared since even before the change to WordPress? If we knew why they don't care, perhaps we could offer some reasons that might make them care.
It has to be "positive", though. We can't say that having a crap website is hurting their business (and I have seen it do so in 2 cases now) or they may kill the site like we've seen them so ruthlessly do on Simple-Talk and ASK SSC.
We need a little advice here please, Steve, because I'm thinking that Sales and Marketing aren't going to place any importance on the forums of SSC.
I think adding pressure from you all is helpful because (as with many organizations), they want data from multiple sources to make a decision. They hear from me, they see some of these posts I send my boss, but getting more people to see/hear that you all care about the site helps. I think some frank honest thoughts, not emotional complaints or rants, but "I used to do this and I can't. This was helpful to me in the past, but it doesn't work well. There's a lot of whitespace, which makes it slower to find info, the constant post errors reduce the time I spent answering questions". Those types of practical, honest thoughts might help get things moving.
The move to WordPress came about because we were struggling for resources, and we didn't have a lot of C#/ASP.NET resources in house that work on websites. We did have people running WP for Simple Talk and RG.com, so the idea was things would be easier to fix. That hasn't proven to be the case, especially with the PASS Data Community Summit, which is more of a priority than this site.
I'd love to move back to a C# based system, but that's hard to maintain in a different way. When we've reached out to the BBPress people (Forum software), they find us to be one of the outliers (maybe the outlier) in size and scale, so they're less helpful as well.
I am trying to spec out some things to fix and see if I can get some budget for a consultant, but that's not an easy thing to do as there's a lot of scaffolding to set someone up and then merge in their code, plus the concerns about security/auth/etc.
I'm in the middle of a rough stretch of travel here, so I'm hoping you all can put some pressure on management here to raise the priority of SSC inside RG.
That's awesome feedback, Steve. The key here will be as you said...
"I think some frank honest thoughts, not emotional complaints or rants, but "I used to do this and I can't."
You'll have to forgive some of us, though... especially those of us who tested a lot of this prior to the release and it was released with all the bugs that we reported. Those were not great moments for us. We were also told that a part of the move was to improve SEO. IIRC, you even reported that the site was taking better hits. Obviously, I have no way to confirm or deny that and that's why I asked for some marketing information. If we could prove that the site was drawing more traffic before the "great downturn" a few months after the change, that might help us sell the need to spend some talent and time ($$$) on all of this. If that's not the case, then it would be a good idea for us not to mention it.
It's a matter of us trying to figure out how to talk to folks that need to make the decision. Ironically, it's how we need to "market" our requests for improvements. 😀
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
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