I looked around long and hard before I decided to use FreshMember as a host. It looked great and it’s amazing value for money. The interface is very word-press-like and it’s easy to use. I was particularly struck by things like a one-click ability to copy courses, so they could be tweaked and targeted at specific niches…. things like that are very nice. I saw a future.We wrote almost 50 pages of content there and loved it. Then we opened up the course to a first wave of beta testers and we’ve got one piece of advice about using FreshMember…
Don’t.
Despite all the upsides there is a major downside – if our beta testers are representative of the online community in general, 10% of people can’t sign in. Try as I might I can’t figure out why not and I’ve even got one of my team who can’t get in. Particularly irritating is the fact that my proof-reader can’t get in and by the time this mess was sorted out, she was too busy to work on this project.
So what advice does FreshMember’s helpldesk have? Less than you’d hope.
Their helpdesk sent a message to my request saying “This can’t happen” the first time and the second time I raised a ticket they didn’t reply at all.
In the meantime, I’ve migrated all the content (18 hours of it!) to thinkific and I’m trying to get my money back off Freshmember.
