@Nick
I feel for you Nick. I see my fair share of people who go charging into a major change - no backup, no paperwork, and generally no idea! (Been there - done that, got the t-shirt, had a refund etc.)
I think you just have to spell it out in simple terms and get everyone to do the following calculations...
1) How many members do you have on your site?
2) How many hours have you spent designing your Joomla member site?
3) How long has it functioned acceptably in it's current format?
4) What percentage of members will leave if you upset them?
5) What is your average membership fee?
6) How much will you lose by breaking your site and upsetting members?
Let us assume the answers are as follows...
A1) 1,000
A2) For most people it will be 100's of hours
A3) For many sites we can safely assume at least a month
A4) On average the lowest number is likely to be around 5-10%
A5) Let's be cheap and say $5 per month per person
A6) Answer is at best 5% of 1,000 users at $5 per month = 50 x $5 = $250 per month
So for a couple of hours reading and referring to the manual you could save $250 per month!
Just think of the consequences of
NOT READING THE MANUAL and having a major problem which ends up trashing your site. That $250 per month sky rockets and you have to do the development all over again.
If you then take on board just 100 hours of development at approximately $30 per hour (as that is what our time is worth as a developer). So not only do you lose your members, their income, but you lost $3,000 of your time and you have to start all over again.
In this case I think I would rather read the manual.
Hope this helps people to think about what they are doing as they move forward with this great product.
Regards
Post edited by: 3cellhosting, at: 2009/04/22 00:26
Post edited by: 3cellhosting, at: 2009/04/22 00:28