We’ve been working with the Ignition platform for almost a year now. Based on our experiences and member feedback, we have a few changes we’re working on.
Updating The Dashboard
The existing dashboard isn’t doing what we wanted it to do. A big part of the reason is that we haven’t published content in the way we’d imagined before launching Ignition. We imagined a steady cadence of articles, podcasts, videos, and courses. To make that steady cadence happen, the Packet Pushers team decided to spend less time traveling and more time creating content.
While we have successfully reduced the travel, we haven’t been able to eliminate travel. Therefore, we haven’t been able to produce as much content for Ignition as we originally planned.
To help solve this problem, we’ve been working with folks in the IT community to create content for Ignition. That’s been successful, but contracting people, helping them develop content, and publishing their work still takes time. The resulting Ignition publication cadence is more irregular than steady.
To better reflect the way the Ignition content library is growing, we plan to update the dashboard to that of a curated front page. The design will be simple and clean. We’ll put the latest Ignition content up there and feature other bits we believe will be most interesting to you Ignition members.
Making Premium Content Prominent
We’ve had some folks sign up to become premium members, and then be mystified as to where the premium content is. That’s a fair point, as the current Ignition design padlocks content free members can’t access. Premium membership eliminates the padlocks, but then there’s no easy way to distinguish free from premium.
We plan to highlight premium content.
Organizing With Collections
We’ll offer a collection-style view of Ignition content. The idea is that if you’re doing research on a particular topic, you’ll be able to find everything we’ve published on that topic in one list.
We have invested in a plugin that displays content in any grouping we specify. We just need to begin organizing!
What’s Next?
We are working with a web developer to help us with the dashboard redesign, which we feel is the most crucial next step. The kickoff meeting is at the end of March 2019. We hope to see dashboard changes in April 2019. Other changes will follow. Stay tuned!
