I agree especially with point 1. I also liked the system at the other place where if you clicked on the bullet to the left of the post, it brought you to the first unread reply. I don’t know if that is possible to do in this forum but it would sure make me dance with joy if that were possible.

The reality I face on the read topics functionality — because I did think about it early on when planning the site and looked — is that the only viable solution I know of is a plugin that costs $250 US a year to do this (the plugin has other capabilities). Every other plugin is 10 years or more old and that presents serious security and compatibility risks. And there are at least a dozen other functions like that which entail additional plugins where it means an additional $50 or more annual subscription. There is an alternative platform to this –which is open source — that is a fork of this. The core theme functionality sells for $500, then there’s a bunch of stuff to add on, and you’re easily into one thousand a year, but the developer strongly recommends that a developer implements that system, so there’s an additional several thousand to $10k a year and add on to that hosting costs, image optimization service, firewall and security costs, SMTP or email service provider to do system and update emails. Yeah, we’re along way from el diablo saying that this could be hosted for $8 a year. That’s in the realm of fantasy.

When I went with this combination of forum and social media platforrms I was well aware that the forum platform was pretty bare bones and I’ve have to purchase a lot of plugins to get the functionality we’d all want. Although, it took actually installing it and finding out that having 20 plugins for the social media platform and 20 plugins for the forums (those are just estimates, I haven’t actually counted) means a ton of opportunities for technical problems. What I’ve also found that I didn’t realize is that because self hosted forums are no longer very popular, there really aren’t many third party developers making plugins / scripts for any of the major open open source ones, and using open source platforms is how I was able to afford this project (the scripts that are needed on top of that are not open source). Both Cakewalk Forums and VI-Control outsource their forums to SaaS companies to run and host. So these SaaS companies are running forums they coded themselves. I think KVR is still using phpBB, which I could install tonight if I wanted. But it would require a ton of development to integrate with a social media platform and content management system like what I have here at LinkedMusicians. This would have been a lot easier to do 10 years ago when there were a ton of developers writing code / plugins for forums and giving a lot of basic plugins away free. But the market died and they stopped doing that.

I wasn’t putting design on the table for things I can change. Because that’s a done deal. I’ve spend a long time managing corporate websites as part of leading digital marketing and also being involved intranets and extranets. The design on the site owes more to intranet / extranet principles than a commercial websites. It’s more of a “control panel” design based on some long standing usability and user experience principles.

I put a lot of time into thinking about this — keep in mind, I didn’t design that layout, I customized it. I selected a design I thought would be best for the purpose of this site. I think it’s simple as heck. If you’re a straight up marketing person thinking of putting more ads on the screen, it’s a terrible design. It’s not really a design marketing people will want, to your point. It is a design that usability and user experience professionals will appreciate because it’s all about functionality and it’s incredibly clear and simple. Now you could still say that yep, agreed, it’s clear and simple, but think of how that space could be used for advertising!!!! (This is literally would be the argument most digital marketers would have with any developer or user experience pro that offered this design.) But this site is about usability and the user experience — not ads. If the site takes off, down the road, I might take ads, but that would be far down the road, and I’d be open to a redesign at that point.

But consider this.This site is doing A LOT. I looked at two dozen themes before settling on this one and actually installed three to see how they’d look. The reality was, it’s very difficult to make what this site does look simple and straight forward so that the user can understand it with ease. The developer’s theme I chose did that. It’s design doesn’t blow me away. I was going to use a design that I thought was really stunning. But then I thought about user experience. Beyond the wow factor, what really matters is: will the average user understand things and not be ovewhelmed because what they’re getting is basically Facebook + KVR + a blog with some reference materials. It is indisputably true that the left hand navigation bar takes up a lot of real estate that most digital marketing pros would HATE. But ask yourself this. Does that bar help you to better understand the site’s functionality and get around without confusion? Did it make a complex site understandable? That’s why I chose it. Now, if this site was all about brining in revenue, it would have been a terrible choice.

Hey Brian, it just occurred to me. There is something about the left hand navigation panel that may not be clear to everyone: that when you click the arrow at the bottom of it, it narrows. I don’t love the way the developer executed it (it would be cool if it used say the fav icon for the logo, for example), and I definitely plan on giving him feedback after installing an update he did to see if that improves upon it. But I definitely will be reviewing the design in a year, and I’ll certainly invite you to be part of that.