As we race towards the 5th version of the www.joshandfriends.com.au website I have been dealing with several 3rd party vendors who appear to have a philosophy of blatantly ignoring customers feedback and requirements.
Let me start out by defining what www.joshandfriends.com.au 5th version is. The current live site is the 4th version and was originally designed as an extendible content management system (Events, Profiles e.t.c.) with 2 additional 3rd party software products: VBulletin forums and Photopost Gallery.
As the current version of the site has grown at a tremendous rate and the industry changes constantly around it, it is vital that a new version of the Josh and friends site be released.
The new version of the site will focus more on:
1) Social networking.
2) Delivery of an extensive range of easy to use software to the end user.
3) A complete face lift to ensure that the site looks appealing and that all the seperate software products are integrated seamlessly.
This will see a range of new third party applications including vBulletin 3.7 (with promised new Social Networking functionality) and Photopost Classifieds.
So why the blog entry?
Well, during the development on the new site I have been dealing with vBulletin and Photopost and I am amazed to find 2 companies with such little regard to the needs and wants of their customers/users. Please note that this is mainly targetted at Jelsoft (vBulletin) and far less at Photopost.
Why do I say the above?
Over the above 2 years we have seen the explosion of Social Networking, spearheaded by MySpace and Facebook. These sites allow users to link with friends, create groups of friends and have enhanced profiles. Many 3rd party application vendors have now released social networking products of their own.
Jelsoft is the producer of the most commonly used forums software vBulletin and in late 2005 Jelsoft seized the crown of “the king of forums” but has since done almost nothing to update their core product, instead choosing to work on seperate module products vBulletin Blog and vBulletin Project, which could only be considered amateur at best. They have done this at the expense of meeting consumers needs, and one only has to browse the vBulletin forums (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/index.php) or search Google for “vBulletin 3.7″ (The next version with promised new social networking features) to find 1000s of furious customers.
Not only has Jelsoft not released any major new features to their products for 2 years but they have also refused to release any official release date on their new product. This means that anyone planing future updates to their websites have no accurate information for which to base their plans on.
While Jelsoft are busy outraging their user base new competitors are really picking up steam. IBP already has full social networking in their forum product. It will only be a matter of time before more irrate Jelsoft users switch over.
In addition to the lack of new features the standard graphic templates of vBulletin look like they were designed in the 70s (ok that is an exageration) but they are outdated. Yet again numerous people have commented on this in the vBulletin forums and yet again nothing has been done or at least promised to be done.
It is time for Jelsoft to stop resting on their laurels and demonstrate why they are the market leaders in Forum software.
Lastly Photopost, as previously mentioned they are no where near as bad as Jelsoft and i would thoroughly recommend their products. That being said they also suffer in a similar manner to Jelsoft. Photopost primarily produce Gallery software. They have just released a new version of their Gallery software with their own custom forums built in. This has enraged many Photopost Gallery customers as their is serious flaws in their core product that need to be addressed. For example Ajax technology is not used to upload large files or zips of images. This means the end user is not presented with a progress bar of their uploads and uploads will often fail entirely. This technology is in the reach of Photopost and is already used on eBay, Flickr, Facebook and Myspace.
Focusing on improving their core product is more important that producing a 2nd rate Forum software. If people want forum software they will buy forum software. I hope Photopost listens to the requests of the people on their forums and does not fall into the same trap of Jelsoft.
In conclusion. I would still suggest buying Photopost as they have a great suite of products and have promised to introduce new features asap. Jelsoft have an excellent forum software vBulletin but it is quickly becoming outdated. I’d wait and see when version 3.7 of vBulletin is released with the promised new features prior to purchasing.
