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GeekWerkz.org (that would be me) refuses to sell beta software and use your problems to refine it or to finance final development. If you really want expensive buggy software at a premium price you'll have to go elsewhere. My manuals and instructions are written in intelligible English and actually tell you what you need to do to install, configure and happily use the software. True, this is not as challenging as the learning experiences you might have with other software, but I figure if you want challenge, you really don't need to pay me for it - you can find lots of stuff that'll drive you whacko and pay them. Or there's lots of free stuff that will melt your brain while you try to get it running (just running, not necesarily even doing what you want it to do).
I've bought enough software that came with some incomprehensible pseudo-manual - usually a short readme written in crypto-tekglish - that I shudder at the thought of what you would be thinking about me if I gave you something like that and expected you to somehow figure out how to install and use it. They wouldn't be warm and friendly thoughts, would they? Even if you did work it out and the software worked well, you might be just a little reluctant to buy from me again. And if you couldn't get it working, I'd probably get flamed one way or another as well as having to refund your money (which my teenagers would already have spent). With some stuff I've had to read through the code to figure out what's going on and what to do. That's insane. Or go to forums and find experienced users to explain the basics. Some programs don't have ANY manual. Those are supposed to be so intuitively obvious that instructions or explanations are not required. As near as I can tell that means that I get to spend some indeterminate amount of time checking every damn feature or button or whatever to learn what it really does as opposed to what is intuitively obvious to me that it should do. Clearly this isn't just my altruistic desire to spread joy and understanding. You pay for a product, you deserve a detailed explanation of how to install, configure and use it. The better that explanation, the fewer questions or problems you will have. That will make both of us happy. In fact, if the manual is really good (and you read it and use it), then any questions are likely to be about new features or improvements or technical issues with your hosting, platform, or type of site. My goal is to create manuals for my products that are thorough enough to eliminate the need for a FAQ. My opinion about FAQs for software products is that they are either sales tools designed for people who haven't bought the product, or they are the result of defective documentation - or worse - using customers to actually create the real documentation for the product. That's no doubt an extreme view. Some products with good documentation are so complex that FAQs really are very useful and legitimate. None of us are perfect so errors creep in and things are missed or overlooked. But, based on my experiences, probably 90 to 97% of the documentation I've had to deal with is, to put it kindly, inadequate in one way or another. One more thing. I hate doing documentation as much as any programmer. It isn't fun, it isn't exciting and you've already finished all the cool stuff. But it's a crucial part of the job for anyone else to use the program without getting all homicidal. If you, as a user, don't feel positively about the program, I failed. No matter how superb a program is, if it drives you crazy to install and configure it, then the full package was a bust. |
