Understanding your customer

What is to follow below is not meant as "taking an easy shot", but instead my objective is to provide some useful hints and tips.

I've been working with the Boonex products on our site now for several weeks. Mind you, this is a heavy traffic site with an average of around 500,000 raw hits per day - i.e. not something you can fool around with, not something you want "unreachable" and most of all you don't want to have to handle the complaints fall-out if something doesn't work, cannot be reached or is simply down. Not to mention the commercial impact - marketing and competition-wise as well as plain and simple dollar-wise.

Having said that: in my opinion the main problem with the Boonex software and company structure is that we seem to be back to classic culture clash between programmers and users. So here is my first clue: A WEBMASTER IS NOT A PROGRAMMER!!!!!!!

Webmasters these days are no longer the nerds they were ten years ago, working on ever more fancy gadgets for their (usually illusive) clientele. A 21rst century webmaster (especially if he or she manages a large site) is a high profile manager, customer oriented, practical and he or she simply does not know and does not want to know about the ins and outs of php. Neither will he or she be interested in the programmer problems. What is is needed is a straight forward yes or no and an actual answer to his or her question.

Answer to questions are NOT:
* Oh, that is on our board somewhere
* You need to write pppgggheejjigr in your nnnhhhggjjtt file (but we won't tell you you where it is, let alone where to put it)

Next clue: just because the webmaster isn't interested in your no doubt overwhelming knowledge and understanding of the Boonex products, php, mysql and flash, THAT DOES NOT MAKE HIM OR HER A FIVE YEAR OLD!

Understand this: Boonex is trying to sell community software. And actually it is a product range that is - potentially - great! (Notice the word potentially, I'll get to that in a minute).
However, what the webmaster is interested in is basically only one question: how do I compete with the big guys (MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, fill-in-the-others). Doing that requires niche marketing, having a flawless high quality operation, understanding the wants and needs of your surfers and GOOD content (which will probably be a lot more than profiles and user blogs or forumposts. What the webmaster is interested in is selling his or her website or his or her pruct(s) THROUGH the website.

Boonex would do well to find a couple of experienced webmasters (preferably the ones woth over ten years experience, since they will have seen MANY come and maybe even more go), put them in a davisory board and listen to them. Especially when it comes to product development and customer support.

A WEBMASTER DOES NOT HAVE THE TIME NOT THE INTEREST TO WADE THROUGH THROUGH ENDLESS - TO THE LAYMAN LARGELY UNREADABLE - POSTS ON BOARDS AND FORA!!!! He or she needs a fast, adequate and most importantly working solution that is easy to use, maintain and alter. To give you an example: I need to do something as simple as changing he top site title i.e. the title tag. Now there isn't anything simpler than that ...... you'd think! Well, in Boonex that's hell. Go to meta tags and you get only two options, not title and not the all important other tags (Google-related very important search engine tags for example - Google tracking - robot text - you name it).
Stylesheets are meant to make life easier and layour much more fancy WITH ONE DOCUMENT! They were not meant to have eight of them for god-knows-what-page. There were meant to replace 1990's table-oriented html lay out and they were certainly not meant to embrace tables. And no one ver said anything about putting the two, plus a form dose of php, in a blender and leave the mess to be sorted out by a webmaster.

Finally the product itself. The concept is GREAT - the execution however is not. It is unclear what does what, it requires waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy to much technical assistance and sorting out, it has loads of ad ons (many of which are actually fun to have) but it is a jungle. There isn't even a normal manual for this stuff!!!

In other words ..... Boonex, puhlease! Webmasters are not five year olds. Webmasters are in a highly competitive, fast-changing and fast-growing jungle out there and they really don't need all the programming stuff, wading through fora and boards and asking the same question five times over so they can piece the answer together. They usually already have a 16 hours workday WITHOUT all that.

So, give us a handbook, give us an admin dashboard that actually works, give us one all-in basic product that can be installed without three, four or five days of labor intensive tech-support days. And give us something that is fast and easy to configure with clear choices in normal English and not in Vulcan. And something that we can mold and modify easily and quickly without having to play programmer.

Oh, did I mention that the Internet market is global, hence not everyone is from America and not everyone quickly understands the one-line US-communication style?