Or so I thought.
It was advertised as being able to migrate the whole blog - which in our case was posts, lists, and photos. It turns out not all the blog got migrated over. The part the readers cared about the most (the photo albums) didn't get moved over. Or actually, the photo albums are not viewable in the blog.
So I did some research on the new company's support page, and came across some interesting exchanges -
pengparic
September 28th, 2010 at 8:25 am
Hi, I really really regret that I moved — all my albums disappeared!!! I know now I can only check the photos at live.photo, but I REALLY DONT LIKE THIS WAY! Is there a way for me to return to windows live? Can you help me stop the redirection on my domain address?!!!!!!!!
You guys didn’t say anything about the album and this is unacceptable!! I need help!!
Ryan Markel
September 28th, 2010 at 3:11 pm
Photo albums are not moved as part of the migration because they weren’t actually part of your blog on Windows Live Spaces—they were a completely different service.
Because Windows Live Spaces will be closing permanently at the end of the upgrade window, the change to WordPress.com is likewise permanent and cannot be reversed.
If you’d like to learn how you can add photo galleries to your WordPress.com site, you can read here.
Spoken like a developer, not a customer or end-user.
As far as a customer goes, when my folks typed in our family blog URL they used to be able to see photo albums right there in the blog (in the form of a preview widget). Customer don't care if photos are a different web service - they were happy seeing the pictures in one place.
And that's what WordPress doesn't get - they may have been different Microsoft services, but to our familes and friends, they are a single integrated customer experience. Perhaps they should've paid more attention to that, instead of blindly assuming people don't care about having to go now to multiple places for content.
This is what happens when businesses don't pay attention to the customer experience.
Maybe they expected people to just buckle down and accept. Maybe they expected people to complain about it. Maybe they figure a small group of people will just leave.
Maybe they just don't care.
I understand that if customers wanted to see more, they could click it (which would launch into the photo site) but that's not the point.
I understand that because I know a thing or two about how these services are built.
If these Microsoft and WordPress folks were smart(er), they could've worked in migration the photo widget piece into the WordPress blogging technology as part of the migration. I'm guesssing if the idea was floated around, some development manager/lead dismissed it as costly and not worth doing (probably didn't occur to them that such a idea could serve as a viable took in enticing customers to stay with the WordPress service. The widget itself could've been updated later to reflect how WordPress does their photo uploads. Or customers could have a choice on how they want their photos to appear in the blog).
Planning along those lines would've gone a long way to ensure a smoother migration and better customer experience (and eventually customer retention).
But no. Not WordPress. Not Microsoft.
Here's another commenter -
ahteem
September 30th, 2010 at 11:02 pm
I’m also very disappointed that none of my photo albums have migrated. The process for inserting galleries in WordPress not only seems long winded, the end result seems neither very user-interactive nor aesthetically pleasing. Stupid me I guess for having assumed that the description claiming that “all photos” would be moved actually meant all photos.
I am, quite frankly, absolutely gutted to have migrated – irreversibly, it would seem – and to have lost the integrated photo-text platform that MSN Spaces offered.
I could not have said it better. What a way to lose customers.
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