For some positive news ... I am almost ready to unveil.

GaryBakker

This morning I was very confused and frustrated. I had a godawful mess that made no sense to me. I'll never forget me first reaction after the migration and I saw what was on my home page -- my reaction was "why the hell are THOSE photos there???" I can laugh now but at the time I was quite perplexed.

The learning curve turned out to be a lot higher than I expected. I did a lot of stumbling around trying all sorts of different things, especially without finding any detailed documentation, but I am now pretty satisfied with the end result.

It is not exactly the same as my legacy site, but it is close enough.

Having spent my career in software development, I am sure the people trying to fix and/or explain things are nearly as frustrated as many of the users. I have great empathy. There are always trade-offs to be made with huge software replacement projects like these.

There are bugs of course. And there are things that Pro users need that don't apply to me so they don't upset me if they are not available.

All in all, I think the new system is good. I was (finally) able to mimic my legacy site with minimal CSS or HTML. My legacy site has tons.

Just thought the people behind the scenes would like to hear some positive feedback.

aaronpriest

Mine is coming together quite nicely. Still struggling with a couple bugs like descriptions not showing when not logged in and missing the Map This feature, but most of my initial really horrible issues were my own fault. ! A few things took a lot of stumbling around to find, but all in all the level of customization without any coding is nothing short of amazing. I think I'll have a better site now than before for a whole lot less effort when the kinks get worked out...

JBHotShots

I'm quite happy with mine. I unveiled mine last night and made minor tweaks to get it close to the look of my previous site. I think it looks and acts much better now.

zacHer0

That's great, Gary. Happy to hear you are getting along well with the new system .

GaryBakker

zacHer0 wrote: »

That's great, Gary. Happy to hear you are getting along well with the new system .

That is a good way of putting it. "Getting along well." Because there are serious bugs to be fixed before I will be "happy".

All in all, this is a good system. But it is frustrating that so many minor (and a few major) things slipped past all QA and Usability testing.

I have been on your side of the table a few times in my career. The key now is good communication, rapid fixing of the bugs, and steady progress to re-do some of the questionable design decisions.

My two cents.
Gary

digitalpins

Yes mine went very simple as well.. Right after the video stream of them showing it and releasing it to everyone I did the migration and everything went pretty smooth had to fix a few things, but the figuring out the options was pretty easy for me. lol took me a day or two to discover i can create a page. duh on my part for not seeing it after hours of trying something lol. Also today I watched the webinar and learned 2 other awesome tips that helped me finished it up. Really loving the new look and easy customization. For the longest I wanted to change my website up but did not want to deal with all the coding again. Love the new Smugmug!!!