The WA Community
As some of you know I've been on WA day and night for the past few days. I've been on my computer about 18 hours a day for the last three days! I've actually been pretty productive and I owe it to WA. Most of the content that I find here, I've heard before. Internet marketing techniques aren't a secret. What I accredit my boost of productivity to is the people, the community here at WA.
I keep the chat window open as I work. Whenever I notice someone who has a question I try to lend a hand. Why? Because I love helping people that are willing to work and help themselves. At the same time, I don't like stepping on other people. I know there are a lot of very helpful and knowledgeable members here, if someone is helping I like to take a backseat and not steal their thunder. I've noticed a lot of members do the same for me.
This brings me to a few things that I feel are essential to moving this community forward. The first thing is the Training section. It's great that everyone can contribute but it's really disorganized. The tag system and search system are great but it seems like it could be presented in a little better way. One idea was having a group system. This differs from categories because a member can create their own grouping, much like Amazon lists. Say I feel that Training X, Y, and Z go together. I can group them and give a description of what this grouping is for. It's similar to the Related Training on the sidebar but it gives a human perspective. To create the group a member would have had to gone through the training and had success with it, it will most likely lead others to success as well.
Features not working, I'm not sure how often stats and numbers and such like member rank, number of followers, personal notifications etc are updated but I would think they should be real time. I'm not so sure that they are. I know this is a personal problem since others have posted videos but I always get stuck on processing video. Any way we can move towards and HTML 5 solution? This leads to my post in the forum. I feel that the site could be done so much better in terms of mobile support as well. I say this because, yes, I can run my business from my iPad. I can type articles update my Wordpress sites and even do minor image editing. It would be nice if WA was supported on the mobile device in someway..maybe I want to read or watch some training at the beach before I hit the surf!
Kyle announced that May 1st is tentatively a new release date. It's going to allow members to join for free and try it out. I feel that things should be 100% working before this happens. I understand the development side. It's hard to iron things out and you just want to get the product out, but, especially with a promotion like this, it's a make or break item in my opinion, but then again that's just my opinion.
Alright, well that's enough of my review of WA for now. I just wanted to say, yes this is a great site, a great resources that I'll definitely promote because I feel there's information for those who need it and community support for those who need that. Please take all criticisms with a grain of salt and see my intention of pushing this community to the next level because honestly, I see the potential.
PS: I do have a question that maybe some seasoned members can answer me.
Who's the WA hosting techs? In fact who are official staff members of WA? Kyle, Carson..anyone else? I do deduct Jay (magistudios) is also a staff member in some way as well.
Mobile: I use WA on my iPad all the time...you can now use flash on Ipads but I do agree with you on the HTML 5 aspect and we will be updating this. We also have plans for phone apps, but we need to see how the system is used and roll out a bunch of features that take priority over this. All things that members can look forward to.
There are always going to be room for improvement within our system and although people cannot see stuff taking place on the surface, we are rolling out 5-10 new updates within WA every day. Very incremental improvements, but they add up to make the service better and better.
We do have plans for a lot better training organization, the ability to self organize with better efficiency, and have plans for many systemic improvements. All of this cannot happen overnight, but I can assure that everything people have mentioned here within this post will be addressed and many of them already are.
We have a team that manages hosting, we are not the hosting techs but if you have any issues with your hosting every, open a ticket on the hosting page and it will be looked at IMMEDIATELY (as in seconds/minutes). We have 24 hour ticket support and as issues come in regardless of their nature, they are addressed.
If you do have any further questions about the hosting or any other aspects, please let us know. I do thank you for your feedback and please know that our service will never be good enough for us, which means that you will only see continual improvements and investment to make it better. Lots to look forward to! :)
I understand about the member rank..it was just an example of something I could see at the moment while writing this page. You're right about the mobile too, it's usable, however, I think the some design elements could be re-designed for the mobile device. And then again since you're looking at mobile apps you can disregard this.
Anyway, thanks for reading and responding to my comments. Keep up the good work.
We are only 3 weeks into The Open Education Project roll out, 3 months from now things are going to be a lot better. By the end of the year, it will be amazing. The thing is that we now have a proper infrastructure to work with and improve upon here and many updates that may seem very large can be done quite easily.
Training will be improved. Tools/Services will be improved. And the way people interact here will be an ongoing improvement.
I can assure you that Carson and I are far more critical of our own work than anyone else could ever be, so your feedback is taken seriously and in most cases, we already have plans for improvement in the areas of question. :)
The training section previously was divided into categories. This has been abandoned for the present system of tagging the tutorials instead which means the "search" engine has to be used to find what you are looking for. All pre OEM tutorials can still be found if you can remember their titles or they have been updated with tags, but until they are updated with tags they will be a bit harder to find.
I agree on the idea of having all our ducks in a row before the new promotion. Trying to get mine in line. lol
For example I have 3 sites hosted here and the very first one I ever built is an SR site, something that was heavily promoted in the past here and silently left to die with with the upgrade to WordPress Express. I didn't swap my first site to WP because I am a bit nostalgic and SR was still available.
Since the OEP update SR is no longer accessible and I can't edit my site to reflect the upcoming offer. The fix is to install WP but that can't be done manually because of the above mentioned 5.0 issue. I am no tech and even though I have purchased Dreamweaver I don't think I will have the time to learn it in this lifetime. I will try to edit my front page with Seamonkey.
Overall the OEP upgrade is exciting and there has been a flurry of activity here since and that is always good. Chat is pretty amazing and members there are very helpful. Thanx to Craig and Christian for last nights exchanges.
