SITE REVIEW: Oxygen CMS the product

Hi,

I'm Dragos.

I, together with 3 partners, have a software development company. We are currently building a CMS for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

http://www.oxygen-cms.com is where you can see it and try it. It's still in the Beta period. We've been working for some time on it and I'd really appreciate some feedback on what we've done from people like you, who know what they are talking about when it comes to web development.

Please review both the product and the site.

The site looks good. It's a nice, clean design, you provide enough information, the information is clearly laid out, and presented well enough so that someone can quickly get the basic idea without reading every word. The site loads quickly, and you've used a variety of visual cues to separate and present your information. Very nice.

On the other hand, your video tour is painful to hear. Please get someone with a more neutral accent to do the voiceover for each presentation. I mean no offence, I am actually greatly enamoured with cultures, languages, dialects and accents of the world. But if you plan to do business internationally, people have to be able to understand you. Please normalise your audio, get an engineer to clear it of noise, fix the EQ, etc. There are too many places where it sounds like the mic is being accidentally knocked and it's painful. If you don't have the resources to do this, consider modifying your presentation so that the sound can be muted and closed captioning can be turned on, so that people can read through the presentation instead of listening to it. Additionally, consider adding a static, screenshot + text walkthrough of the installation, configuration, and site modification/maintenance process for people who don't have either the time or the bandwidth to watch the video tours.

I can't comment on your product. Your target is small businesses and entrepreneurs, and it is possible that Oxygen CMS offers them enough value to make the purchase. I'm not part of that demographic, though. I am an individual providing design/development services to others, and as such, there are other products that offer me a much better value than yours. In the free version of Oxygen CMS, the number of pages I may create is limited, your logo may not be removed from the site, and it may not be removed from newsletters. My only other option is a $199 version. Sorry, but some of the most popular and well-supported blogging platforms and content management systems -- namely WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal, and Joomla -- are opensource and/or free (Movable Type's free personal edition is far more flexible and powerful than Oxygen). Please, don't misunderstand. Your target audience consists of people who may not be technical, who may not be code-savvy, who don't have the time to dig in and customise templates. But developers who have the time and ability have better options available.

Hope that helps, and good luck with the site and product!

- Gita

Hi,

Just had a quick look around your demo pottery site and couln't help but notice the opening line of the home page ...




A pottery sex shop established in 1864 Coooooooool Any pictures

Good luck though.


Cheers, Prime ...

Thank you both for your feedback...

justG, very constructive comments. I know you are not the target End User...but think about this for a moment: you are a developer and could develop templates and other modules for your customers that are in that target...As you noticed, it's for people who want to be able to learn it in 5 minutes and that won't really be using such advanced functionalities actually

Prime,

You are right, funny mistake...we let people change all the text in the demo so it looks like somebody pulled a prank sorry

I think that your site is very well organized. Sections are separated cleanly, and there is more than adequate information for people and potential customers to understand what you are offering.

I agree with JustG's comment on possibly providing some sort of static screenshots to supplement the video tour in case that people do not want to go through it or spend the time downloading it.

I like how you allow users to look at the front end of the CMS as well as the back end of the CMS.

My only real comment other than adding static screenshots to supplement the video tour is a section of the features page. On the features page there is a section called 'Get the Facts' after you select the link(s) to find out more of the features.

I don't really understand what or how you are comparing a custom website to the Oxygen CMS. Who is doing this comparison might I ask? Is it people that have used both Oxygen and created their own custom website. When you rate Oxygen as having a '9' for 'Intuitive Interface' and 'Features,' how are you comparing it and rating that of the average custom website. I guess what I am trying to say is that I think this table of comparisons needs a little more clarity.

nice colors!

The site looks great! I found a problem the first time I logged in the backend demo with "admin" by using Firefox. The tour windows cannot be closed, it will move with your mouse. IE is ok. Not sure if other people had the same problem too.

Clean layout
Clean code
No Javascript Errors found
No CSS Errors found

My only question is why are you advertising in BIG letters on a ORANGE star that you are in BETA? How is that a selling point?

<cheeky> The orange "star" is called a "badge." And have you not seen your share of AJAX-y, "web 2.0 stylee" web sites? C'mon man, it's *cool* to be in beta! (Forever and ever and ever and ever... [reference GMail...]) </cheeky> =]

(Incidentally, I'm in no way implying that Oxygen CMS will be in beta forever.)

.g

no, no I know it's the "cool" thing to do, but that doesnt mean I get it... I mean everyone is in beta, or even ALPHA now! (http://www.meebo.com - sweet app, but how the heck is that Alpha, even beta is pushing it) anyways like I said nice site, and if you want to go along with the beta trend then 10/10, but in my own humble thoughts, 9/10 because of that BETA badge

First impression was nice. I am always in favor of having at least a few important text links in the footer just incase the menu on top doesn't work for somebody.