We have come to the decision that it is time for Kessler Freedman, Inc., to discontinue doing redesign and initial design of Wild Apricot hosted web sites. We may reconsider this decision in the future, but for now, that is our decision.
For our existing clients: We will continue to support our clients to the best of our abilities with Wild Apricot based sites that we have built and maintained for the foreseeable future. There is no change is our support of existing client sites.
Here is why we have come to this decision on the design element.
In today’s world, a client should expect their newly designed/redesigned web site to be good as a design for 5 years at least. Yes, it will have changes and alterations and it is possible that AI will be creating more massive changes sometime in the future, but for budgeting purposes on visual design, you should be able to use that design for at least 5 years.
We’ve been working with Wild Apricot for clients for 15 years at least, and to be honest, it’s never been a great visual design environment. There’s benefit to that, however, because the servers were very limited by software and the hosting arrangement as to what could be done by their clients – and how things could be broken by their clients. Security was on them. Functionality was on them. A lot of support was on them.
But over the years, Wild Apricot has fallen further and further behind on the visual design side. It is still good enough for a lot of smaller associations. We do see a lot of larger organizations only using Wild Apricot for membership and event components at this point, and basically plugging in that content into a more contemporary looking site using a different software and hosting framework for the majority of the public site. In these cases, it is more specific application purposed, and out of the main site hosting and design piece.
It has always been a clunky system to design in.
Recently a bigger problem has occurred. Application issues occur and support is needed, and support has gone from being pretty darn good, to being a lot less than that. Too slow, too inaccurate, not enough followup, too much delay. This has been an issue developing in slow motion for several years but it’s really not acceptable any longer.
To be honest, this isn’t an issue that impacts Wild Apricot alone. THIS IS AN INTERNET INDUSTRY ISSUE. Support almost everywhere stinks. The investment capital used to build internet services has gotten much tighter, and with that, budgets, and we all know that customer support gets impacted by budget cuts very early and severely when such cuts happen. AI is often touted as the answer. AI is only as good as documentation and data and software – currency and specificity – can be made. AI can be great. AI can also be that faceless phone answering/messaging software leaving people in limbo.
Unfortunately, the state of Wild Apricot’s customer service (and distance it has fallen behind as a site design option) is enough of a problem that we don’t think our clients should commit another 5 years to it by paying for a redesign or creating a new site on Wild Apricots. We might be wrong. But we wouldn’t tell our clients this if we had trust in Wild Apricot’s situation at this point. We just don’t think they are doing enough to support a 5 year commitment to their offerings. There are better options.
So, for our existing clients, here is what the plan is for the foreseeable future:
- Kessler Freedman, Inc., will not provide a full redesign your Wild Apricot site for a new iteration on Wild Apricot.
- Kessler Freedman, Inc., will continue to provide support services for your Wild Apricot website. This recognizes the fact that Wild Apricot controls the server and software environments and our support must be limited to within the capabilities of Wild Apricot.
- Kessler Freedman, Inc., will provide consultation on migration options and if WordPress is selected for purposes of migration, KFI can provide redesign and hosting options as well.
We will be contacting our clients with further information in the near future.