When we don’t have a ready or good answer for something, we all trot out the fallback and muse over the length of string. Hummm.
If you ask us to implement a feature for your website, that is not part of the current repertoire, we’ll not lecture you about the length of string, but we may ask you for a contribution.
OurLocality is now 5 years old and has been through several transformations and continuous improvement. We started when WordPress had not even reached version 3. Not many were prepared to pay for additional features then, and today that option remains – still – an entirely optional extra. In fact we find that most of customers have no idea how much they could do with the free features they have. How many of you have fired up Jetpack, which will turbo-charge your website and seriously improve your sex life?
However if you do want extra support and features over and above the basic free website package, it comes in £25 chunks. If you want multiple chunks, well you can do the math. In fact, when compared to the dark art of washing machine repair, that is pretty darn cheap. Just because the software we use is mostly free, should NOT imply that what you get is entirely free. It costs us £100s a month to keep webservers going, security patches installed, essential repairs and maintenance.
We’re happy to entertain most things, provided you have thought it through – no one will thank you if you create a complicated website that your colleagues cannot begin to understand, so please resist the desire to get too fancy. There is a condition. Any feature we add must not bump into (technical term for ‘conflict with’) our other features or core functions. While it is the nature of the beast that some software conflicts will occur but for the amounts of money we charge we simply cannot spend time fixing these, unless they are our own and will benefit the whole community. Plugins and templates must be stored in the WP repository, we haven’t got time to waste with FTP clients and updates the old fashioned way.
In the future, we may even have to charge for your website – there it is you have been warned.
So, to keep it free, you should consider paying for additional or personalised support and extra features, or certainly consider a donation.
