Winners Of Improve Gmc Competition, And comments! Options

[Kristofer Dahl]

RESULTS

Winners of the "Improve GMC" competition

I am proud to present the result of a very special competition at GMC. This time we asked you guys - GMC Students/Rockers - to come up with improvements ideas for the site. We then asked the GMC Instructors/Ultrarockers to nominate five winner candidates. Finally everyone got to vote for the three winners.

Congratulations to 1) Zen 2) ZakkWylde 3) KaznieNL. To remind you, these are the prizes you have got to look forward to:

Zen has a lot of cool suggestions - here are some of them:

* A monthly calender with to make it easy to attend all the the cool events/workshops we have got going on in the community. I agree that the way we have it now is quite messy and alot of the good stuff gets hidden in the deep caves of our forum.

This one is definitely coming - in fact it will be a key feature when build our own, customized community software. Among many things, this solution should cover a chat schedule with countdowns and chat topic announcement.

* Zen is not happy with the direction of the mtp program. We will keep experimenting with the mtp program to find a balance which works from an economical perspective and which allows for continuous learning with a private instructor mentor. I hope to return with an update soon.

* Zen wants to be able to go back to older recorded video chats - this is something which has been requested by many. You can expect to see this when we have a little more experience from the video chats - so far video chats are very new to us and an unstandardized GMC feature.

As you can see Zen is a worthy winner for this competition - be sure to check out more of his suggestions here.

Zakk Wylde had the idea of offering GMC "Quick Access".

In short the idea is to either sell GMC lessons "piecewise" or offer full access to the lesson archive for a limited amount of time.

Without diving to deep in the realms of site statistics and visitor behavior, I want to say that this sounds like a cool idea. Since many members have requested a cheaper alternative to accessing GMC content we should try to find a way.

When will this happen? Without too much technical hassle we have the option of offering full access for a limited time at a lower price. This is something we could test as a one day offer.

However the biggest limiting factor in making these decisions - is that at this stage GMC statistics aren't developed enough to allow for more complex payment ideas/tests. In order to safely make these decisions we need a custom way of analyzing our statistics not covered by standard solutions such as G Analytics.

This is in the making but not something we have prioritized so far. Our focus has always been to deliver as many user features as possible. However you guys are of course right in the sense that in the long run new successful ways of packaging/selling of GMC content will allow for even cooler user/site features.

Does this remind anyone else but me of how hard it is to achieve that golden balance in life?!

KaznieNL suggested we add a random lesson button. I like this idea a lot - maybe we could even call it "lesson stumble"..? This is probably quite easy to implement - the only question is how/where to present the button logically (without blurring the advanced search with yet an option). Right now I am thinking that it would kind of cool to have really big such button at the bottom end of the frontpage.

* Kaznie also suggested we move the sign up link to a more prominent spot on the website. Ultimately this goes down to how we want to prioritize with the few pixels we have got to our disposal - a little experimentation with this is a cool idea however. Perhaps we could even do it so that logged in members aren't affected/don't see it.

There were several other cool suggestions as well - Keilnoth had the idea of upgrading the lick of the day page/videos (in the making!) and working out cool algorithms to suggest lessons and learning plans. Member Deleted suggested an iPhone/iPad app (also coming). Once again be sure to check out this thread with all the entries!

Finally I want to say that I think the development of GMC is an amazing journey - and we wouldn't be anything without all the suggestions and feedback that keep coming from you guys.

My goal for the future is to be able increase the development pace so that we don't have this huge queue of awesome ideas waiting. However I try to tell myself when I get frustrated about new features coming to slowly, that this stuff is so new to all of us - if we had the option to do it all at once it would probably end up really bad.

So in some way I think part of GMC's charm is that it's still a web site in the making - it is completely different now compared to three years ago - and my prediction is that the coming three years we will see an even greater development.

Now let's get back to fishing...ehrm I mean practicing

[MickeM]

Contragtulations guys, good suggestions!

[zen]

This is great. All amazing ideas.. Can't wait for them to be implemented Kris.

Out of my ideas, my favorite was of "GMC Theory Practice Room" .. .. What are your thoughts on that?

[Kristofer Dahl]

This is great. All amazing ideas.. Can't wait for them to be implemented Kris.

Out of my ideas, my favorite was of "GMC Theory Practice Room" .. .. What are your thoughts on that?

I think it's a cool idea. The first step must be to start building GMC widgets/tools (as suggested by others as well).

The coolest would be if we could have a second life style jam/theory room of course! =)

[ruben_mcn]

Congrats Guys ..

Will we have to pay extra for MTP ??

[zen]

Will we have to pay extra for MTP ??

Hmm, good question

This post has been edited by zen: May 25 2010, 11:31 AM

[Pedja Simovic]

Congratulations to the winners but also to all the other members who participated in the competition. I think there were many great ideas and I can see GMC development team having tons of work in future

[maharzan]

Congratulations once again all. It would be great to have a list of ideas being implemented on a 'to do' section or something apart from these ideas (if any).

[Fran]

Congrats guys, this competition certainly brought loads of new exciting ideas, which I'm sure will serve to make GMC even better

[Andrew Cockburn]

Excellent ideas - I am looking forward to seeing how these turn out!

Prizes will be sent out soon

EDIT: Forgot to say, can I have real names and addresses form the winners please - just PM me!

(Zak, I know you have won prizes before but I didn't keep your address)

[Ivan Milenkovic]

The coolest would be if we could have a second life style jam/theory room of course! =)

That can happen very soon, and it would be revolutionary for music teaching

[skennington]

congrats to all you guys and another big thank you to all that made suggestions. One of the many reasons that this website feels like home to so many of us..

[Adrian Figallo]

congrats guys!!
and YAY iphone app

[Gitarrero]

Congrats man, great suggestions! Wonder how the new MTP will be like!

[del-4fr53e3]

Congratulations!

[thefireball]

Awesome results! I'm excited about the new implementations. I just hope nothing will cost more or something.

[kaznie_NL]

* Kaznie also suggested we move the sign up link to a more prominent spot on the website. Ultimately this goes down to how we want to prioritize with the few pixels we have got to our disposal - a little experimentation with this is a cool idea however. Perhaps we could even do it so that logged in members aren't affected/don't see it.

Thanks everyone for voting! and thanks GMC of course for the cool prizes

Kris, if I may, isn't your main goal (at the end of the day) to make some money? And therefore, the pixels that make you some money should always be at the top of your priority list! At least that would be my view (keep I'm mind there's a reason I haven't reacted on the Marketing Director Needed advert )

If I see these cool entries with Kris comment saying something like "we are working on that already", then I'm excited already

Kaz

This post has been edited by kaznie_NL: May 28 2010, 08:39 PM

[Lian Gerbino]

congrats guys, great suggestions indeed!

[Ivan Milenkovic]

Wow, when I check out the GMC how it looked 3 years ago, it definitely shows just how much work has been done, incredible!

This site is building all the time, but it's probably similar as with guitar. We don't notice it in short-term periods, but when you look back - OMG!

[Bogdan Radovic]

Congrats everyone and I am as others very excited to site updates!
Its really amazing to see how GMC grows from day to day!