I’d love to know more about your experience with our system – you mention having used it in a real environment… can you elaborate? Have you tried it recently or a while ago? We’ve done a lot recently at addressing potential issues with the things you point out.

We find many of our competitors web-based systems suffer from some of the points you make, but we’ve been extremely pro-active in addressing them on our system.

Addressing directly a few of your criticisms:

- clunky, clicks and pageloads: by adding more AJAX to our site as we’ve been doing this year our web-based system becomes more like desktop software. Pageloads are reduced, drag-and-drop functionality becomes available reducing clicks, and things become less clunky.

- slow and frustrating: what areas particularly does this apply to? we find nothing but praise from our customers in terms of speed and ease of use

- takes ages to upload/download: we encourage our customers to convert any custom pages they’ve made to PDF before uploading them, rather than sending the original files. The file size of these PDFs are much lower than the original files. And we allow customers to view thumbnails of all their pages saving them from having to download an entire PDF

- generic, run of the mill pages: we offer various standard templates which most customers are very happy with, and various ways to customize those to add a touch of change. any any pages other than member profile pages can be created by you in your own software then uploaded to the site

- InDesign: most of our customers don’t have this software, and buying it would add greatly to the cost of their books. our customers prefer to see books with everyone having lots of writing that they’ve added next to their photos rather than pages with just photos of members, names (often misspelt) and fancy page design.

I’d be happy to hear more about your experience with us – we really do try to take all criticism onboard

The reality of the matter is that:

Online systems are:
- clunky and inflexible
- slow and frustrating
- takes ages to upload/download
- require too many clicks + pageloads

They create poor quality, generic run of the mill pages.

Yes, and we have tested your “revolutionary” system in a real environment – and it failed badly!

It is frustrating in all of the above ways!

If you want to create a quality publication, then you would use quality software like Indesign.

It is not hard to get spelling correct. Please don’t blow the 1% of mistakes out of proportion!

Yale uses “Year Book” throughout.

They claim to have invented the concept.

See you soon.

Jake.

Best

Nick Franklin

Cheers,

Adam