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18 Dec 2008 11:47
I was too busy and then too tired to write a post yesterday — but yes, we did manage to introduce Pro accounts at Wikidot.com yesterday. And even more — have already had a few sales. Also we have received very positive feedback from our Users, Friends and Customers.
Whenever I write about new features I try to thank people who helped us designing the premium features, offered help testing and gave previous advice. To all our great supporters — thank you.
The major problem to solve right now is that we are still stuck with PayPal-only payments. Although you can create a PayPal account within a minute, this still is not the way we would like the payments to work. We almost had a deal with one of the card processing institutions (I guess it is better to skip actual names) but they in the final review rejected us as their client. So we started with another one and although we are already approved, there is still some paperwork to be done. This is my personal blog so I can say it openly — the financial world sucks. At least if you are not a big corporation with millions of $$ in revenue.
Other problems we will need to solve are:
- marketing for the new Pro accounts (both internal, to our current Users, and external)
- we are thinking about an affiliate program — it is much nicer to pay our Users than to an advertising company
- improvements in Wikidot itself
- easier sign-up for membership in Sites (people call it one-step registration)
- easier file upload so that you could use your storage more effectively
- we could start working on the (S)FTP access, would be great
- easier photo uploads (perhaps use BrowserPlus for drag&drop?)
- complete the work on API to open Wikidot to 3rd party developers
- during the intensified community consulting at pro.wikidot.com (while testing Pro accounts) we received a lot of other ideas how to improve Wikidot. I am sure we will look at them in more detail and implement most of them starting in January.
Sure we got much more work than this, but IMHO for the next couple of months we should concentrate on:
- getting more users
- increase sales
- make Wikidot (and Pro accounts) more attractive
Some other loose ideas might be to:
- implement Facebook Connect
- Users could log-in using their Facebook credentials, skipping the registration step, or associated their existing Wikidot account with a Facebook account
- we could post-back status updates (e.g. "Michal Frackowiak has started a new Wiki michalfrackowiak.com) — this gives free advertising for us
- Piotr was also thinking about a Facebook Application — a simple wiki embeddable in the Facebook profile.
- implement Google Friend Connect — similar to Facebook Connect
And yes, I did shave my beard yesterday thus I look 10 years younger now. But it is winter in Poland now — extra beard was quite useful, which makes me miss it a bit.
rating: 2, tags: ideas pro wikidot
Saw the new pic. Nice beard.
With that said:
I read nothing here about community-related features. Features that help community builders build communities, in my opinion, should take precedence over "just getting more people."
The amazing feeling of pride a member gets from watching his post / edit count grow shouldn't be discarded. The average member of an average wiki is what makes wikidot grow, not necessarily the number of registered users.
— hartnell
Good direction, but you should also concentrate on social aspect of your community — friends, friends, friends. Think of wikis as groups in Facebook that connect people. This way you can get really high. Sales will hopefully go higher too.
Do I lose my custom domain mapping since I'm not a pro member yet?
Better grouping (with social networking in mind), custom forms, and a little more forum juice (optional to avoid alienating those that like the current elegant style) would help me help wikidot grow.
I was very close to enticing one of the largest Wii clan communities into setting up here. I'm hopeful that in about a year, I'll have another chance to bring them in, so keep up the great progress.
Just read the faq (re my custom domain mapping question). You don't take features back. Got it.
Sorry, the custom domain setting disappeared by mistake from some of the sites. Now fixed. Sorry about the trouble.
I do not mention it anywhere (yet), but if someone would need some of the Pro features, especially for community sites, we would be glad to grant them. This also applies to custom domains.
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me