Hi Clay,
I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but I would make this move a very high priority. Maybe your highest.
The website is painfully slow — you can wait 5, 10 or even 20 seconds for a page to load. I have no doubt this is costing you sales. Many Internet users have become accustomed to instant response and will give up in frustration when pages take a long time to come up.
The WEPS is a rich system with many accessories and choices to make, and it’s really a major time commitment to browse through everything. In fact, a lot of prospective buyers will browse the Forum looking for answers about how the system performs and accessories they may want to get with their first purchase. It takes way too long to do that with the server speed the way it is now.
Further, the Forum is an incredible resource for engendering customer loyalty and stimulating repeat sales (in part due to your personal participation.) I know I’m contemplating buying various stropping accessories I probably wouldn’t have considered had I not read about them in the Forum. Nowadays, I hestitate to login because I know it’s going to take forever just to read the most recent messages.
The website is far too valuable to WEPS to let it continue in this state.
+1 on *all the above* Sounds like pepperass has experience in the world of ecommerce.
I think he is ‘right-on’ about potential new users. But speaking from my perspective as an existing user type, I find it kind of charming (if that is the right choice of words!:dry: ) that the forum has this sort of funky feel to it. In a way it is kind of nice as one tries to see thru the poorly performing web-load pages and thinks of what must be the management perspective of that company. Surely they must be putting all best efforts first into its products and a way second or third or fourth into those forum web pages. Actually, it is almost a clever reverse marketing psychology, if it was, in fact, planned that way. As strange as it is to say it, it is almost a nice breath of fresh air, in this day and age of super glitzy over produced company web sites, to find a little ‘funk’ here. It subtly reinforces who and what is WEP. Sharp knives first, sharp super glitzy web sites second (or third or fourth…)
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