Personally, I'm not a big fan of SEO, I receive many weekly emails promising me that we will be on page 1 of Google
The point for fmsoup is not, to become No. 1 but to get found at all. Try to find it, when you don't know the exact URL. I promise you won't manage it. Even myself had to initially lookup Celines post in the Salesforce forum to get back to this site (and probably still would have to, if I hadn't bookmarked it).
OK, that was only in the beginning. But now this site is one year old (Congrats!!!). And there is still no sign on the way to get here, merely by asking some aged grey bearded men for the hidden pass thou shall enter the realm behind the blue mountains.
And if you personally don't do SEO you might still live in the nineties, when the internet was still black and white (no offense). At least you don't realise your potential. I get 99% of my customers from SEO. Just saying...
I hear what you say and of course basic SEO work, starting with getting registered with the search engines is a must.
What I meant was that there is no magic in getting on to page 1 of search results, good content is what drives this. For example (yes, I have picked the exact post header on purpose):
I’m here because I want one easy, clear place to discuss FileMaker, share my knowledge with those who need help and learn from those who are more knowledgeable. I think this can now be that place and I’m very grateful it has been set up.
I am not interested in sniping at Claris, frustrating as they can be. Yes, they destroyed the Community Forums with the switch, but we are all here because we use and love their products, want to make great solutions and help others to do so. That said, I’m not going to object if people want a thread where they vent their frustrations with Claris, if that helps them. @AndyHibbs I don’t believe that any decent organisation should object to criticism, rather it should be a source of gauging what they are getting right and getting wrong. That this is a place not sanctioned by Claris allows those using it to express their views freely and for Claris to monitor those views, hopefully in a productive way. In fact, I would welcome an official Claris representative being a participating member of this forum and expressing the official line.
Hi Jul, welcome to the ‘soup’, its been a long time since the last meal in London.
I guess I’m getting worn down having been banging my head against a brick wall trying to use FileMaker to create branded products, rather than being an in-house developer or ‘normal’ consultant, which appears to be Claris’s focus.
As you know, I am not one to stay silent on events that are important to me. However, equally as a FileMaker, now Claris, partner, I feel any criticism has to be made constructively and be balanced by the many positive things that Claris do.
I have worked alongside Apple for 35 years now and the only time they have been worth contacting was during times they were not doing well. When they are succeeding they have a habit of just telling you what you want and have never had a nice culture, despite the excellent service they give their consumer customers. This culture has to rub off on Claris and the company is now certainly changing under Brad. We’ll see how that goes, but it appears to have become less personal in the UK over the last few years.
I would like fmsoup to be looked upon with approval by Claris, not a refuge for all those unhappy with Claris. Yes, we all agree they did a rubbish job on the community, and like a good politician, I don’t believe they’ve ever apologised for it. But fmsoup did appear as a result of their own poor work, so there must be some degree of rubbing salt in their wounds to get over.
I’d love to see some Claris contribution to the ‘soup’, but this will only come with time and providing there is positive reason for them to do so. Hence, the good needs to outweigh the bad.
Yes, it’s been a while! I think it’s worth mentioning that, driven by similar motives to the ’soup’ and to a degree, by the Covid-19 situation, I have been expanding the user group I run to a much broader audience with Gary Palmer and Jordan Watson’s assistance. The aims are similar to what seem to be the aims here - to create a platform that effectively fills the gap left by the demise (transformation?) of Technet where developers and users can exchange knowledge and ideas. We had 45 devs/users attending online last time, including several names you’d recognise. It's not supported by Claris and people are free to speak their mind, but we did have Douglas Wallis of Claris present FileMaker 19, so I think it is possible to be both outside and acceptable to Claris. If you or anyone else is interested, look on the FMBug.org.uk website.
1] You've done a great job and should be very proud of what you have created here.
2] I am not a fan of this site's UI but at least it's not the mess the Claris site is a YEAR later.
3] I use forums to get questions answered and for me FB suits that purpose very well (not that this site wouldn't) plus I am work likely to get work from FB than this site which has happened and is a nice bonus.
4] This site while nice is very late into the FM forum game and you most likely will only get dedicated experienced developers who want to tap into multiple sources of data and different perspectives. The number of people like that is VERY small. I think Claris's claim of 50,000 developers is way overblown in terms of what I would consider a "developer".
5] If you want to get more members I think it would help to have a more professional UI and less of a "grown home" built this in my garage look. That is not a reflection on you but this platform most likely. You then need to get more link backs from other sites and promote the site as the best organized most professional site for FM work around.
6] Sure this site started because the Claris site sucks but that fact alone a year later is largely irrelevant to increasing the membership here.
If you really wanted to take this site to the next level it's going to take you and small team of dedicated members to come up with a vision for that and make it happen OR just be happy with what you have done and don't worry about it too much
Garage look, serious ? Cécile in a few days has been able to create a forum much more functional than Claris that needed more than a year to bring up what we see now - and people got paid for that. Oh yes, the Claris Community is really nice looking, but then is barely usable. Try this on an iPad, a tablet made by Apple. Most of the time the page doesn't fully come in and then you need to press cancel and refresh a few times for the page to finally render in full . . . with links one over the other.
And talking about the page, you need to click on See more a lot of times to get every posts, when it works. Here everything is on a single page, and the last post is at the bottom, every time.
So an nice UI can bring a very bad UX, the Community is a good example of that. fmSoup is crisp and clear.
Agreed we need to bring more users, but I am sure that will come in due time.
While I am totally fine with the interface in FMsoup (and Discourse.org), I can understand that that there are user interfaces for this type of activity that are even nicer. HOWEVER, it is the FUNCTIONALITY of Discourse that I fell in love with and that, frankly, I really enjoy about FMsoup.
Another example of a team that has the opportunity to dedicate a lot of development personnel and time to their Discourse forum can be seen in the Asana Forum...
That's actually where I personally had my first experience with Discourse and I was blown away. I had used forums for years, but Discourse just... did everything I wanted in a way that was just naturally intuitive. As soon as I wanted to see, search, review, post, edit, filter... anything. The first way I thought I could do it, was the way it actually worked, simply and quickly.
Yes seriously. This is not a professional looking forum that is just a fact. It's also a fact it works much better than the Claris site which is fine but looks do matter. You need form and function together for a complete experience especially if the forum owner wants to appeal to beginners. The UI/UX could use some work but it will be a lot of work so have to decide it it's worth it or not.
I can understand what you mean by a more "professional", I guess "corporate" look. I'm more a UX|UI person but not a designer. If I knew more than the little html and css that I know, and had time, I would probably polish certain things that look a bit too playschool to me.
Nevertheless, I installed a few themes and people can switch if they don't like the minimalist one. Ideally I would design a whole image for the soup. Maybe @cheesus could help. But for that I would have to learn how to theme for Discourse. And I simply don't have the time and money for that. Because in order to expand the functionalities, we would have to get the corporate hosting plan or self host. None of which is impossible but require time.
Again, its the UX that makes the whole difference. The rest would be the 20% that requires 80% of the efforts and resources.
"This is [insert your opinion] that is just a fact."
I can't imagine a less professional sentiment. I appreciate Cecile's diplomatic response, but discourse just has it's own look. I've seen versions set up by Jeff Atwood himself, and they're all pretty similar.
Sorry but I can't understand.
I just got an accurate answer from @WimDecorte on an issue that bothered me in almost no time today and I'm glad to be prepared to share this with a customer tomorrow. What else do we need?
You did a great job. Fast growth is not that important and sponsoring seem to work fine.
The Hype You know, that thing that was criticized in the video series produced by Claris for the WIP.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m content with what we have. I was not looking for fast growth. It’s been steady and healthy over the last year.
That doesn’t mean I am sitting on it. I think introspection is fundamental to keep up and thrive.
I simply want to continue making the soup more delicious and nutritious. Relevant and quality content is an endless endeavor. Growing the knowledge repository is one of the keys to a durable community. It felt sad to me that a lot of interesting content discussed on FB is like single use plastic.
Look you have a done a great job here and accomplished a lot but if you want to appeal to a much broader and new audience a "corporate" look that makes it appear a much larger organization is behind it will go a long way to doing that. I am not saying you should do that but that is what it's going to take but it's not fair to ask you to do that all by yourself and may not be the direction you want to take things anyway. I appreciate all the effort you have put in.
I disagree that this site doesn't look professional enough. It looks friendly and clean, I can navigate and find things here so much more easily then the Claris/Salesforce forum, and certainly more so than on FB as a forum. I've noticed that it has slowly but steadily grown over the past year since it started.
I admit that I don't post or even read here very often, though I have been subscribed to the weekly digest for much of the past year. I think part of the reason for that is just general overload for me.
The FB group can be convenient for me as I tend to check my FB timeline when I need a break during the day, and some of the FMP group posts show up within my timeline. I don't ever go to that group's page, nor is FB convenient for following a thread or any kind of coherent discussion...but it's great for me to give a quick answer if an interesting question happens to show up on my timeline.
I think my point is not to be jealous of any growth on FB. But perhaps take advantage of FB as a social media tool to help promote just like any other business would do to drive traffic to their own websites. Here are some random thoughts on how the Soup might gain some visibility in peoples' timelines:
People found the FB group because they are already on FB and searched for 'FileMaker';
Enable any FB 'like' or 'post' icons that this forum offers so that someone here can easily click to post an interesting topic to their own FB timeline, thus gaining extra visibility for this forum;
Start an fmsoup page on FB -- not as a forum, but as a searchable page that can then direct people here to this forum;
Maybe when someone here presents an interesting tip or trick or technique, you could post a two-sentence tease to the fmsoup FB page so that those who start following that FB page will get such posts in their FB feed -- re-reminding them that this forum is a great resource.
Just some thoughts off the top of my head. ..
Howard
I'm on a few other Discourse groups, for Swift, AirTable, and Estimote (beacons). I like the platform and it's usability. Swift has oodles more developers than FileMaker, so Discourse can definitely scale. Never understood that argument from Claris. Apple also has a trillion dollars at their disposal, and could have (or build) anything they wanted. They're using Discourse.
For iOS and iPad, there's also a 3rd party native app (Fig) that makes using Discourse way more pleasant than Discourse's own mobile web app. Cecile made a post about it earlier today. I'm already using it. It's good.
I do not understand this - maybe it's language dependent.
For me, discourse looks very professional - but that's not the only priority. There are a lot of other forums out there that do not look that good - AND they are much harder to read, to follow postings.
The fact that Adam Engst is using discourse for 'Tidbits' and 'Agenda', a relatively new application with a modern approach as well - that speaks for discourse
The 'official' claris forum might look more professional - but it's not a forum, maybe a blog and it suffers on every corner.
A few weeks ago, I was searching for something for my car and I came across some car-specific forums... oops...
In my opinion there are two things that could be addressed:
The UI
More Traffic
The fmsoup UI isn't that bad. It's clean, simple and self-explaining. But when I have a look at the Asana Community Forum I see, how much more beautiful the interface could be. They didn't change very much, but what makes the big difference is the font they use (proxima-nova / Helvetica / Neue Helvetica), which makes everything much more subtle and modern.
If you want me to I'd be happy to contribute some time into the UI. I'd love to change the bold icons in the header and the fonts. That should already be enough to make the forum look much more modern.
Speaking of the traffic: I don't think that the UI is so bad that it will keep new visitors away from the forum. Sure, a more beautiful look could be even more appealing but if you're looking for help, you don't pay attention to the looks at all.
But as I pointed out before: New FM users do not find this forum for 3 reasons:
A. No SEO for the correct keywords
B. No Backlinks from other sites.
C. Not enough relevant content (thanks @AndyHibbs for pointing that out)
A. can easily be fixed.
B. can be fixed by spreading the word in other forums, FB, our own sites etc.
The problem with C. I guess is, that this forum gathers mainly experienced users, that have been driven away from the old forum. And these users do mainly post the sophisticated stuff that no newbie can relate to. That means, that new users rarely find their way to the soup when they google for a certain (newbie-)problem.
So how can you fix this? I guess by spreading the word, being patient and waiting for more members to come over time.
You know, that thing that was criticized in the video series produced by Claris for the WIP.