Starting at Dolphin 6

I remember back in the day wanting to start a social community website for programming and developer users who have subscribed to me on YouTube.
I remember thinking how great Dolphin 6 was until it came time to buy and install mods.
That was a nightmare and a half  lol but to get the feature i wanted, was something i had to painfully do.

It helped me to write mods, sell them and use those sales to invest in bigger mods for my site.
How were these mods sold? who remembers Expertzzz haha yup, right there.

With some patches and newer 6.x.x releases, it pretty much stayed the same until 7 was released.
The whole system got a makeover, module installations were much easier, the layout got a much needed makeover etc.
It was time for me to go microwave a couple bags of popcorn and cover my mouse and keyboard with popcorn butter and stay up all hours of the night playing with the system.

Dolphin has come a long ways and have received it's share of negative feedback, but hey...that's how we learn, right?
With what Boonex is working on now, i see that they're taking this much more serious and more business minded than ever and i hope to see that increase over the next few years.

Oh yeah, if i could only tag users in forum posts  this would be for you Andrew hahaha
When clicking on the "New Message" for messenger, can you have it so that chat is selected with enabling the ability to reply instead of clicking on the chat than chatting?
I was a little confused on that part at first.

OK -  DIARY OF A NEW CUSTOMER !!

Today 2nd June. AM

Just signed up for the $50 + 50 plan (Apps & Hosting) 

Impressed  with the slick stripe payments. Its very good btw!

But apart from a 'Red Dot" in the Licence Field, I'm totally lost as to what to do now, or where to even look  / go now !

I've so many questions now.  I want to get started, i'm excited for sure, but I'm not been pointed in any specific direction.

First impressions - there are no obvious instructions to follow for a new user! At least nothing apparent to me, at first glance.

Like -

Where - do I go to "see' the back end of my potential new website?

Can - I start to experiment, build an "off-line'  version, get my toes wet, see how it look and feels before going live?

What - happens now?

Today 2nd June. PM

Launching the launch window!!!!

OK - Licence Bought - Go to activate / Launch said Licence, and ran into problems with the correct naming of servers, again I feel the fact that I needed to summon Help to even activate the site was not good. Should be a case of; [ imput company name here ] & Click GO!! That said, getting help here, was super quick, through the UNA site. The new message alerts on my phone were also impressive, ditto for the UNA - device APP itself.

Overall

I feel the whole UNA "shop window' is very confusing indeed.  I mean - I'm never quite sure whether I'm actually on my OWN SITE, or UNA's !!!! at any one time, it's very confusing, seriously. Suggest colour code, UNA have a  different back round colour to own site.

Pricing

Probably be happy paying $100 p/m ok, (if I was actually making progress building a site) I'll talk about this in a while. In my opinion, having your 'business plan" priced at $800 a month (as it stands), when you can not tell me definitively, what exactly i will get for it!!! is plain pointless, to a small business, with a budget in mind!!  Mind the Gap!!  Big jump from $100 p/m to $800 p/m !!!  My site could take anything from a few hours, to months to implement, and there is no apparent tangible way of telling me in advance, what it's going to cost me???, come on! and that's not workable for any business.  Consider offering a "white label, ready to go template, out of the box, design and implementation for a set fee, payable per month, all I need to do is change the logo, up-load some pic's turn on/off the modules i want or need, and i'm LIVE!!  A "definable feature package'  memberships, forum, live chat, blog, photos etc for $xx per month, designed and implemented. That would interest me!

The Software itself

For sure, there is evidence of brilliance everywhere, Seeing how the template it looks and functions on my various devices, it's very impressive, the notifications everything, (on your own site that is! - UNA!) But the Achilles heal of the software is that it is designed by; Expert Tech geeks, for Competent Tech Geeks.  If your not a programmer, your lost here. Its not for any "Idea Person" in my view.  It's for a Competent Tech Geek, with an idea!  In short - as it currently is - the software is not 'user-friendly" enough for the mass market your after.  I've stated THIS as the standard you need to aim for ;- 

http://www.vistaprint.ie/websites 

The CMS is as easy to edit as a word doc, and modules and pages are simple ON/OFF options, money back guarantee, and outstanding tel support.  

I feel, UNA would need to offer some form of "support" at the start in order to "be at the races" as a product. Assign each new customer of UNA, to an "angel" initially as part of the deal, supported via a "P.C anywhere" type support / with chat.  Get um up and running with a revenue generating prod, and you have a good shot at retention.  But after 1- DAY on this, I'm so far a little disappointed, I thought I would be able to do more for myself. I'll try again tomorrow!!            

Just wondering, if anyone actually got a site up an running on this platform yet? TEST POST as well!