Jason

Attached is a screen shot which explains my woe.

The “directory you’ve always dreamed of” returns an outsized logo, blank map that covers the iPhone screen and is useless, chopped off text and unwieldy search functions.

My issue isn’t that GeoDirectory is a work in progress. My issue is it’s for sale. I’m not sure what you saw tooling around my REM cycles, but this is not my dream. If I delivered this to a client I’d be laughed out of the room followed by a trip to General Sessions court; you’re using it as an in progress demo.

This is beta test stage, and not very far along in beta. This is the stage at a software company where everyone shows up at a round table with their homemade API’s, coffee stained notes, PhpMyAdmin logins and beer to chat about assembling the ideas for testing.

I want this to work, and would have been willing to give years of expertise toward testing and helping make this kill the marketplace.

Instead, this is killing your customers’ time and money. I’m not sure we know why this is in the marketplace, and why we’re all essentially unwitting venture capitalists for a product not terribly far out of conception.

I would not have released this for pay. I would be afraid of reading what I’m typing.

Again, I’m your cheer team. You purport to know our dreams, let us alliterate them so you might finish this to build a product we truly do need.

I do not want my money back and I believe I represent a number of customers’ emotions.

The next step is actually putting it together and not being afraid of asking for opinion. I know I have several. This is constructive criticism, but make no mistake, it is strong criticism.

Releasing strong software is the hallmark of company integrity.

A mobile friendly site should populate a list quickly, sort the results by distance and/or relevence based on various criteria and keep the pointer map separate so it’s actually useful when it fills the page on its own. The checkmarks on the map are not mobile friendly, and trying to get the map out of the way to reach content is difficult on iPhone and Android.

Think user user user user user. Real location apps (even their HTML5 web cousins) don’t put maps in place for show. They search by criteria and present well designed lists which link to further information. Here, we need that criteria to include geolocation.

Let us be your sounding board. We’re not terribly far from a useful product. I’d be thrilled to speak with you at any time if you need real world feedback, and encouragement. We’re displeased for valid reason. It can be fixed.

I am done sending unfortunate truth. I hope we all work together positively as customers with a company we want to see succeed with this product.

Thanks again,

Jason Kibby
Chattanooga, TN
423-544-1801
facebook.com/jasonsayshi

I want to be very clear. I am not an angry customer with little knowledge taking my misunderstanding out on the product.

I’m a serious developer who is trying to use your software to customize a directory. That’s what you build, directory software.

If you open your own demo on an iPhone 5, the map is so large and unwieldy no one can actually use it for an actual application. When I installed the GeoDirectory core theme on my own host, the blocks are all out of whack and I feel stupid trying to find out how to move them. It’s as if someone put all the ingredients of the world’s best apple pie in a pan and forgot to bake it.

The end user, both those of us buying GeoDirectory, and those who would use the resulting applications, must be considered. As it is, I’ll put a $500 reward out for anyone who can use GeoDirectory as it is and actually build a working model which would be competitive in the marketplace for any real world purpose. Right now it’s a bunch of coded toys tossed in a box, and I’ve yet to see a demonstration of it that I can point to and say “Yes, people will use this to actually connect with my business.”

GeoDirectory is marketed as a mature solution, natural successor to GeoTheme and has a great looking landing page that tends to fall apart when you try to dig into the nuts and bolts of the demo.

Now, caveat emptor. As a customer, I have a responsibility to purchase products fit for a particular purpose. I saw “Geolocation” and “Directory” and bought into the GD (appropriately lettered at the moment) because I wanted to believe it would be useful.

Your own demo throws “Sorry, no record were found. Please adjust your search criteria and try again” ALL the time, and the demo theme I installed looked nothing like I expected. Attempting to modify it is a pure lesson in frustration, and I was coding in Perl at 15 years old. I’m not the smartest person in the room, but if I can’t make sense of a theme product for WordPress either I need to retire and shoot myself or the product is faulty.

The bottom line?

GeoDirectory should not be in the marketplace. Not yet. It’s a high minded product with lots of potential bells and whistles. It’s not baked yet.

What do I need as a customer?

I need a directory which takes less than 45 seconds to load which enables me to create locations, attach products and services to those locations, sort by distance from me, have reliable review functions and reasonably adept administrative features.

I need people to be able to find products and services via a location aware directory. That was the promise of GeoDirectory, and it was released perhaps a year too early.

Unfortunately, I have work to do. I have wasted perhaps a dozen hours trying to tool around GeoDirectory and make sense of it. Having thoroughly failed, I have to find another set of tools, spend more money, cross another learning curve and put a project together for a client.

Your home page says, in some bold letters, “… location based business directory portal you always dreamed of.”

I’d take that down in a hurry, put up a Coming Soon page, and visit the nearest Catholic confessional until this product can live up to that slogan. Right now it can’t, we know it can’t, you know it can’t, and if GeoTheme is the wonderful product it’s reputed to be you are doing it a disservice with this catastrophe.

At the end of the day, I’m your cheerleader. I’m a guy with ten projects in the works who NEEDS YOUR PRODUCT and WANTS TO PAY FOR EXPERT HELP to make it work like the proverbial charm. I could not be any more excited about GeoDirectory, yet business is business and we have to be extremely honest from the heart about where our projects lay.

When it’s not a buggy mess with inaccurate marketing slogans, I’ll come back. When I can actually hire someone who knows how to make it work, I’ll be the first to jump in and pay whatever is necessary and fair to support the project and those who build it.

You have done a disservice to me by wasting my time and accepting payment for a project which isn’t anywhere near valid as a functional directory portal.

Jason Kibby
Chattanooga, Tennessee
423-544-1801