Requesting Your Thoughts On the Latest Tweaks to the Site

[peter]

I was going over some recommendations on the site from @mustakatu.He has significant experience with digital, including leading marketing, and I found his insights extremely valuable and they’re of the quality where I’m largely going to act on just about everything. They’re primarily areas where — to be really candid — the site represents a first draft. Even more, my expertise is strategy and managing this area, including websites and online communities. In this capacity, I’ve had to play the role of designer, coder, usability manager, user experience manager, writer, SEO manager, etc. Those are areas I’ve managed, with actual subject matter experts doing the hands-on work on the big sites I’ve managed. Doing a one-man passion project operation (with the help of my son and daughter for input and more recently, with the help of folks like @lamia6 and @doug on the technical front) isn’t exactly the same thing. And not having the ability to test with a focus group also means I’m driving the ship by instinct. And while I trust my instincts, they’re imperfect, and I am not a master of all trades. I’m best at strategy, managing, and leading.

I realize that nearly everyone in this group is from Cakewalk Forum, so that’s what we’re used to — and likely the other online forums and social media sites we use — so to a large degree, people want familiarity, and I’ve tried to keep that in mind without creating a knock-off, and making improvements where possible. I think the structure of this site is better organized than most of the online forums. I think the messaging system of this site is better than most. I think the features are better than most. Factually, the capabilities of this site is far beyond most of the online forums. The big challenge is how to best bring all of this together in a way that is seamless, friendly, and creates the optimal user experience for you.

Here are some of the latest improvements I’ve made to the site and what I’m still working on:

– I’ve pulled some forums that people asked for, but never used. Yep, nearly every forum people requested wasn’t used by the people who requested them. Help me out here, folks! FTR, I can easily bring things back. But I’m going to wait until we bring in more users when the registration goes public to do so.  I’m probably going to be pulling more subforums this week prior to opening registration. I have heard, from a number of folks that they get overwhelmed when they see a bunch of forums. While I think that’s a fair criticism. I also have to manage for where we’re headed. Again, if I went with all of the recommendations for this site, I would have 10 more forums that no one ever posted in. And then other people just wanted the Cakewalk Deals forum — not realizing that they could just bookmark that forum like they did/do at Cakewalk Forum while ignoring all of the other forums there.

– I’ve revised and shortened some of the names of the subforums to make things look less busy, as I realize that some folks feel overwhelmed by the choices.  I’d love to get your feedback.

– I’ve changed the color of the forum names to blue to make it stand out from the other type. I’d love to get your feedback.

– I’ve simplified the Magazines & Podcast menu. I put it together to make drilling down a one click experience. But after hearing @mustakatu’s feedback — which caused me to look at things from another perspective, I decided to simplify it. I’d love to get your feedback.

– I’m just starting to work on the home page, which admittedly, has been an area I haven’t given much attention, because I registered all of our current members myself. But knowing how important a home page is to bringing in new users, I plan on working on improving it over the next few weeks. I’d love to get your feedback.

– Also, are you using the email alerts that you’ve set up? The system has sent out more than 2,000 email alerts that people set up. Are they helping you stay up on things? Are they reaching your inbox?

We have a suggestion box, where your constructive criticism is always welcome. But I really would appreciate your thoughts on this stuff while I’m doing these tweaks. This site is designed to be useful for you, so it’s one thing to create things, but it’s another to learn how they’re experienced by you — that’s the most important part of this, so I’m eager to hear your thoughts.

– Peter

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

21

[patrickwichrowski]

Some topics that are not read but were deleted will be stuck as unread forever for me.

New album soon!

[url]https://linktr.ee/patrickwichrowski[/url]

[peter]

On patrickwichrowski said

Some topics that are not read but were deleted will be stuck as unread forever for me.

I’ll look into that and ask the theme developer.  I don’t think they should be stuck st unread after I run a database process, but I’ll check with the developer.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

1

[jude77]

I think you’re doing a really good job.  It’s a task I certainly wouldn’t undertake.  Personally, I find the site user-friendly overall, though I tend to only look at the Deals/Free Instruments sections.

In terms of using blue for the forum names, that was a good choice.  In a cross-cultural study 37% of people associated it with loyalty, stability and tranquility and 43% of people associated it with relief.

3

[peter]

On jude77 said

I think you’re doing a really good job.  It’s a task I certainly wouldn’t undertake.  Personally, I find the site user-friendly overall, though I tend to only look at the Deals/Free Instruments sections.

In terms of using blue for the forum names, that was a good choice.  In a cross-cultural study 37% of people associated it with loyalty, stability and tranquility and 43% of people associated it with relief.

Thanks for the feedback! When you have a chance, check out the recently added magazines and podcasts section. It includes excerpts from magazines like Mix, Sound on Sound, Tape Op, American Songwriter, Songwriting Magazine, some great podcasts and YouTube channels on music theory, songwriting, and music production. The idea is to have all of this in one place — completely free — where everyone can find more content of interest — and hopefully — facilitate discussions about it in the forum and on the social walls.

I did realize going in that with the Early Adopters group, as most of us only used the cakewalk Deals forum, and maybe the Songwriting Forum, that it would be a challenge to get people to check out other forums and content. That’s okay. I don’t give up! I’m a pragmatist. If you find value in what’s here — and if we continue to find better ways to make people aware of content in other parts of the site — I think we can go beyond the Deals Forum. But in any event, I’m happy to have you and everyone else here, however you use the site!

Here’s a direct link to the landing page for the Magazines & Podcasts section.

MAGAZINES & PODCASTS

If you enjoy reading, like I do, here's the page that has various magazines and web publications featuring articles on music production, like Sound on Sound (SOS), Mix Magazine, Tape Op Magazine, MusicTech, etc. If you have a chance to check it out, I'd love to get your thoughts. You basically see the article exceprts and click on more to go off to the site the article is from to read the complete article -- everything is free. I'm just trying to make this a really valuable community for all of us and the articles presented are all available free from the various publishers.

Music Production Related Magazines, Blogs, Podcasts & YouTube Channels

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

2

[joegyork]

Hi Peter – just a very minor suggestion – if possible I’d quite like a ‘Thanks’ button to go with the other responses – I used that at the forum that shall not be named 😉

[peter]

On joegyork said

Hi Peter – just a very minor suggestion – if possible I’d quite like a ‘Thanks’ button to go with the other responses – I used that at the forum that shall not be named 😉

I also like the thanks reaction that they have over at Cakewalk Forums. We had several requests for it when the site was being built. You would think it might be easy to find. But unfortunately, after extensively researching and testing out several reaction scripts (plugins), there was only one I found that would let me do it, however, when I tested it, it was incompatible with the theme we’re using. I’ll continue to keep my eyes open for new plugins, but the reality is, forums are legacy. Most of the development for the open source forums dried up more than a decade ago — they’re legacy, so there aren’t many developers working on the plugins for them. The option I do have is replacing the angry reaction with the thanks one, which, while I don’t love how trolls abuse the angry reaction, it does have uses and I would not want to replace it now that we have thousands of posts.

FTR, I had to buy a completely separate reactions plugin for the social walls and each comes with an annual subscription that covers the developer’s maintenance, updates and customer support. I have used some very well supported, regularly updated open source scripts, but I largely go with very actively developed paid scripts (plugins) and pay for contracts including the reaction scripts for the forum and social walls (two separate plugins, and two separate annual service contracts). Open source plugins for the forum — and really any open source forums — are mostly old and present security and script conflict risks. Beyond leading digital marketing at large brands, I’ve been running my own sites since the mid 90s, and I’ve had enough experience with hackers that I’m pretty careful about ensuring I use actively developed and supported scripts. But the reality is, the legacy forum software market is pretty small these days, so there’s a small amount of active developers and because the market is relatively small, the costs are higher than they were 15 years ago when there was a ton of open source scripts. Anyhow, more than you asked! But  that’s the reason why there’s not a lot of choices for reaction scripts for this (or any) legacy forum platform. They’re a lot more choices for the social wall platform, as that’s far more popular than old school forums, so developers are going where they can make a living.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

[joegyork]

No worries! I never realised how complicated this stuff was! Added kudos to you for navigating it all!

[peter]

On joegyork said

No worries! I never realised how complicated this stuff was! Added kudos to you for navigating it all!

It’s soooo much easier for a dime a dozen guys who create Facebook Groups, subreddits, and affiliate marketing price comparison sites like MSD to get tens of thousands of people to click on affiliate marketing links as a nice little side hustle or better. While I’m using affiliate marketing to try to help pay for the cost of running the site, at the volume that we have and they get clicked on for purchase — consider that a Ben Osterhouse libraries — which I love — have a 3% commission — while, I believe it was Steven Slate Drums, has a 7% commission. I thnk I’ve taken in around $25 US this year, which is less than the cost of one of the reaction plugins without the service contracts. With he size of our community plus the unregistered traffic, and considering that the affiliate links make up around 5% or less of all the links we have, it doesn’t come close to paying for the hosting, the email service provider, the plugins, the service contracts, etc. I put more than 1,000 hours into building and maintaining this site. I could create a Facebook Group in a minute and create the graphics for posts in minutes. But a site like this means having to constantly update the scripts (plugins), WordPress, deal with resource issues with the server, problems with conflicting scripts. It’s a ton of time, that’s why when Larry left, I had to handle the maintenance PLUS post deals to keep everyone coming back, which I set the site back around 4 months, as I didn’t have the time to do all of that work PLUS post deals. So, we’re getting there and we will finally open for public registration this month, but having to balance maintaining the site, handling people’s questions and issues, finishing building the functionality before the public release, handling the email service provider PLUS the web host, handling the technical issues that regularly occur on site this complex — it’s AT LEAST a part-time job.

My hope is that as we open to the public and grow, we’ll have more people posting deals so that I can take that off of my plate and focus on managing the site.

As usual, a TMI post! As my family will tell you, I’m not a very secretive person! Hmmm… except for the fact that I use my pseudonym, Peter Woods — from my working musician days — on this site! My desire has been to keep this out of search so my business clients can find my business related information when searching on my name, not my singing!

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

2

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