Is there a prayer HC will fix their site?

Dear Musician's Friend:

Considering the fact that you have removed all venues for subscriber feedback, I would guess you are pretty tired of hearing complaints about your new web site.

You must know, however, that your users are venting elsewhere ( see the Seymour Duncan site forums, for instance ). As the owner of an IT solutions vendor myself, I know that user response is not always a good way to measure the value of a new interface, but I have to agree that the community opinion is dead-on in this case: Your web designer has delivered a very poor product.

I have no idea what effect this has had on your enterprise in terms of advertising revenue and site visits. Certainly, if these numbers are within range of objectives, your management may believe you should just forge ahead. Obviously, your call.

Still, any person with just a little sense would have to ask, if an inferior web presence can deliver "x" results, what would a good one do?

Just a thought, guys.

Plenty of folk have been praying for HC to fix this.

Either God hates HC/MF (likely), or there is no God.

Everyone at HC knows the problems, so at this point, it's not a question of being tired of hearing complaints, but there are no new complaints that haven't been heard already. You can start with User Reviews, go to the lack of browsability with the videos and articles, blogs not functioning, etc. etc.

There are redesign efforts going on right now. There was a test in the production environment over the weekend. Changes are happening but they are not "ready for prime time" yet and the public cannot see these changes. Furthermore, it wouldn't be acceptable to pull down the site until these changes are in place, it's marginally better to have a web site with problems than no web site at all.

The first priority was to get the forums back on vBulletin. That has happened, but work needs to be done there, too. The original plan with the 2.0 forums was to hand off the hosting to someone else, and as that didn't pan out, HC is now having to install additional servers and is committed to hosting the forums itself. This also involves an upgrade to vBulletin 4.0 for security enhancements and the other benefits the new version offers.

Needless to say trying to do all this at once is a huge undertaking, so it's taking a while for these changes to occur. On the other hand, a few things have improved. On the "content" part of the site, the search function is now working really well (although it doesn't find things in the forums, of course, because they're different platforms). The "more like this" feature is working, so if you pull up an article on, say, interfaces, then you'll see listings of more articles on interfaces. The article publishing process finally works, and new articles are being added on an almost daily basis. These are all things that can be done now, before the re-design is in place.

Fixing the user reviews is the highest priority right now, along with creating a home page that actually looks like a web site for musicians.

No one is happy with the current situation. No one here thinks the site is "good enough." The good news is that it's not going to be left in this state, and there is a commitment to fixing it. Limited resources to do so is a big issue, but progress - however slow - is occurring.

However, prayer certainly wouldn't hurt

One more thing: Traffic has increased steadily since the 2.0 debacle - check out the attached graph from Alexa. At its nadir, our traffic ranking had dropped to 16,000. Now it's back up around 5,000 - not as good as our 3,500 peak, but it's movement in the right direction.

This is due to the forums picking back up, but also, despite any problems with the content site, the new articles being posted are getting hundreds of views. You can see a list of the most current ones by clicking here, which is updated every time a new article is posted.

So don't give up. The fat lady has not sung yet, in fact, we're trying to escort her out of the dressing room.

Thank you for the report, Craig ... Certainly unexpected ...

May I suggest you cut and paste your essay into a news brief on the main page under a high-visibility link .... I have no doubt your subscribers would be reassured and even encouraged by what you have said here ...

There are redesign efforts going on right now. There was a test in the production environment over the weekend. Needless to say trying to do all this at once is a huge undertaking, No one is happy with the current situation. No one here thinks the site is "good enough." The good news is that it's not going to be left in this state, and there is a commitment to fixing it. Limited resources to do so is a big issue, but progress - however slow - is occurring. However, prayer certainly wouldn't hurt

Like the recent Cap placed by BP on the Well, I hope and pray it holds.

Fortunately if things don't work, we don't destroy an entire region. We just lose traffic.

Let me speak candidly here. We are part of a very large organization that has much bigger fish to fry than HC. There are good people involved in this company - very good people, IMHO - and they have always given us complete, 100% editorial freedom. That alone is a rarity in this day and age.

In retrospect, the HC 2.0 calamity is probably the best thing that ever happened to the site. When something goes so wrong, the people at the top were hit with a giant "WTF?" and started looking into it.

Now, these aren't "suits" looking into it and trying to come up with ways to kill it, but people who were genuinely concerned. They reached a point where they had to decide whether HC just wasn't worth the effort or the expense needed to fix the problems, or whether it was something of real value - not necessarily monetarily, but in terms of being valued by the community.

Thankfully, they chose the latter. And they aren't even hippies I made several "blue sky" proposals about the site for the next 12 months, and they got behind all of them. Many of these changes will take time to manifest themselves, but they're based on building on what we have, not changing the paradigm.

So in a way, we're re-booting but with a loyal base of very good people. I've never wanted to let y'all down, and apparently, neither does anyone else here.

I just had a wonderful conversation this morning with the powers that be. The basic topic was "Okay, we're buying 100% into what you're proposing for the next year. Now let's talk about the year after that, and after that..."

This story will have a happy ending, or I wouldn't be here. And I'm doing everything I can to make sure that happy ending becomes reality. The best part is that I don't have to do it alone by any means, and by that I'm definitely including this wonderful community of fellow nut jobs

Not "pie in the sky" ?

Dan

I, and I am sure, others appreciate the time you have spent to bring the subscriber community up to date on your plans for HC.

Although I only just created an account here, I have been a frequent visitor and have always regarded HC as an important resource.

Good look going forward!

Thanks much for your support. I do everything I can, but it's the community that makes HC unique. So, I'm mostly trying to think of ways to support the community better, and provide more ways to interact.

BTW - let me plug something here while I'm at it. If you want to be "kept in the loop" regarding what's happening with HC, subscribe to our newsletter. There's a section every issue called "Dear Musician" that often covers news of the site (as well as other topics), a blurb on what's hot this week, a couple "spotlight" articles (typically a new review and tech article), hot tip, forum watch, etc. It's kind of a well-kept secret although with basically zero promotion, we have about 66,000 subscribers -- more than a lot of magazines in this industry.

Currently it's on a bi-weekly schedule, but we'll be going weekly soon as it seems to be picking up momentum and we want to encourage that.

Both. It was blueberry pie.

Gosh, such a fracas about a web site. I guess this is the only place on Harmony Central, so the only thing I noticed that was wrong was during the brief and aborted experiment with a different forum program.

Whatever you're missing, I hope you get it back, but for me, things seem to be working normally.

Craig ...

I am reluctant to use your forum as a help desk ... However ... Since there is no help desk forum ...

You mentioned problems with User Reviews ... I posted a review last week which has yet to show up ... Is this because the app is broken, or because the moderator has yet to approve the post?

If the app is broken, perhaps a note to the community to stop posting user reviews would be helpful ...

Um, if we are griping about the site here, the fora are virtually unusable at work. Various Windows XP machines, Explorer or Firefox, desktop or wireless lappies, all the same result: page load time measured in minutes. I can literally catch up on new activity on two other sites before I can view a single post here. I don't even bother browsing at work anymore, I just look at those threads I've posted on that have new responses.

I know I'm short on details, since I'm not at work now, but if anybody has any idea what's wrong or if there's a fix on my end, I'd love to hear it.

I never go to HC anymore I can't navigate it and it just looks like total {censored}. It's a shame they ruined that site, seriously. But I have faith that Craig will work everything else out for our community and I'm behind this community!