And that is, in essence, the problem that SBI faces. It was this lack of awareness that caused the massive overrun building a product that seems largely to have been unnecessary. Why?
The Google Zoo roll out impacted SBI sites at exactly the time their new BB2 was undergoing development. The BB2 module was way late (typically so); and likely way over budget, too. No one who saw BB1 doubts the scale of the change; but again, building your business on a proprietary system was ALWAYS going to be expensive.
I believe this distracted everyone unnecessarily from the primary threat of the Google Zoo. And that threat is now manifesting itself … a large drop in the number of subscriptions, new purchases, and renewals. Currently, 9000+ domains have already gone from their records (3rd party checked), that accounts for 25% of their total registrations.
I also believe, UNFORTUNATELY, that the attitude within SBI’s forums suppresses those customers who could help save SBI; but for ages, old customers with ‘real’ usability problems have been ignored, banished and ridiculed on the forums by the very people they were trying to help.
But what is worse: with all the reports that have been done (now 3 major projects) to analyze the failing sites, dropping traffic, and poor rankings, still the experts (the forum admins, the Sitesell Employees, and ‘expert’ coaches) have largely failed to turn around their own sites that are suffering, too. And there is no credible evidence that these reports actually ‘work’.
The reality is that new customers are less willing to try SBI (it’s returned to ‘unproven’, it’s expensive), affiliates (of whom there are thousands) are demotivated by their affiliate program, and existing customers are shutting down sites daily for whatever reasons.
So why was the BB2 largely unnecessary? Yes, it was needed because ‘clunky’ was indeed the right moniker to describe the system. However, it may have come too late to result in any meaningful uptake in demand; failed to placate or make BB1 site owners jobs easier (I converted three sites to BB2 approximately 1000+ pages…). And my site was one of the later groups to be converted; but there were times when I still couldn’t edit pages, upload new stuff, or build pages. And about 5%~10% of the time, I had to redo pages; including one or two pages that took hours to design.
But worst of all, even before development of BB2, WP was making serious inroads… already had EVERY feature that so far had been built-in to BB2, and quite a few that haven’t yet been added.
Instead of embracing change, SS went on anti-Google, anti-WP tirade, designed to bolster its own standing… but both of these have now come back to haunt SS, and its owners big time. That may have looked like the smart thing to do at the time, but in retrospect may have been a mistake.
I have looked at dozens and dozens of websites through 3rd-party resources, and only found a handful that had NOT been affected by the Google Zoo; mostly these were newer sites, too.
SBI, heal thyself. Then tell us what to do.