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SocialGo
- A Social Media Platform For the Rest of Us By James Martell You might remember that over the last couple of newsletters, I have been talking about the extreme makeover for my kit car site. I told you that I was looking to upgrade my site, and that I had been using Drupal as a content management system (CMS ).
Drupal has been working for me, but it was not without its frustrations and disappointments. Frankly, I found it technically difficult and many of the modules and themes were out of date. Also, there didn't seem to be any clear path to upgrade it. So as I mentioned last time, I was looking for a new CMS. I had big dreams, in that I wanted to build a true social media style website. Some of you might have thought I was nuts in asking for one system to provide all of the features I was looking for. But hey, I'm an eternal optimist. So being fairly familiar with the Internet, and after some searching I found SocialGo from Bright Things PLC. At a glance, it looked like it would offer all of the features I needed. So I signed up for the free trial and spent the next few hours tinkering away with the software. I was able to put up a very quick demo site and I found the software quite intuitive and it seemed to work reasonably well. In no longer than a couple of hours I had basically set up a demo version of the site. Mind you, this also included a chunk of time spent on other SocialGo based websites.
Generally, it was a pleasant experience for everyone involved. I even had some new BootCamp members who found SocialGo reasonably easy to navigate around. I was quite happy and satisfied, and so I decided to move the site from Drupal to SocialGo, which you'll remember I talked about in the last issue of this newsletter. I was not alone, a few other members also decided to make the move to SocialGo. This was very helpful, as it gave me the experience of watching other people work with SocialGo. From newbies to the advanced members, everyone seemed to experience few frustrations. Most of the problems I saw, were mostly due to the operator themselves. One thing that a few members struggled with, was organizing the tab structure across the top of the page, but this was easily remedied once they figure out the solution. Not to make this sound like an advertisement for SocialGo, I must speak to two current issues that I have found with SocialGo. The first is in the area of tutorials. The second is in customer support. Despite SocialGo being relatively easy to use, the training materials are certainly not adequate. However, the same can be said with WordPress when they were starting out. SocialGo has very few training videos and their print documentation is also thin and weak. There is no telephone support, but there is a live chat and e-mail support. Although you can expect to wait 2 to 3 days to receive an answer by e-mail. And I've heard that some folks have complained that the answer to their questions seemed rushed and were not answered fully.
However, I imagine and hope that more third parties will spring up to help fill in the void of their training documentation. In fact, our own BootCamp member Tammy Morales from Calgary, is developing custom SocialGo designs to those of you developing SocialGo based sites. This is a great thing, and I suspect it is just the beginning. Personally, I am in the process of organizing and creating an ongoing video training series for the SocialGo system. I'll definitely keep you posted on its progress. In the meantime, I would definitely encourage you to check out SocialGo if you're interested in creating a social media website. And while you're at it, have a look at my new kit car site with all its new fancy and sparkling features. All the best,
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