We were very excited when we launched Progress Planner a few short months ago. And now, we’re even more excited to enter the next phase! We’ve collected feedback from our first users and are currently improving our product. We’ve fixed bugs and inconsistencies and have a lot (a lot!) of ideas on how to adapt and enhance the product’s functionality even more. In this post, I’ll tell you what to expect from the next versions of Progress Planner. I’ll discuss the pro version and our plans for the free version!
Listening to your feedback
We researched and thoroughly tested our plugin before launching the beta version. But you need real users to get honest feedback, so we listened to the feedback of our first group of users. That has been so very helpful!
More ways to earn badges
People were excited about the idea of our product but often felt that it took more work to earn badges. And they were right: you need to put in a lot of work to get a badge! Some of our users indicated that they would like to be able to earn badges much more often. That’ll make it easier to stay motivated! That’s why we’re currently working on creating monthly badges people can collect. I’ve seen the first designs and they really look amazing! I want to catch them all!
What should I do next?
Another thing we heard back from our users was that people needed help understanding what they should do to start improving their site and their scores. We indicate that your website activity score is low, but what should you do to improve it?
We are working on giving people tangible suggestions on what they should do to keep improving their websites. For example, we’ll tell people to update a post that hasn’t been updated in a while. Or suggest they write an about us page if the site doesn’t have one yet. These suggestions will become part of Progress Planner, making it easier for people to decide what to work on next.
Expert webinars to boost your skills
We are very excited about our plans to host webinars with experts in different areas. What we want to do is to host special webinars (every month or so) about specific topics that are important while maintaining websites. We’re thinking about site speed, SEO, accessibility, and broken links. In these webinars, we’ll remind our users about the importance of these tasks for maintaining a website. Next to that, we’ll give them tips on how to improve their site in that specific area.
Introducing Progress Planner Pro
Our goal is to create a proper free version of the plugin that is usable for everyone who owns a website. The pro version will be aimed at people who work with their websites professionally and who really want to take their websites to the next level.
Mini-courses for hands-on help
In Progress Planner, we’ll advise you to add pages and posts to your site or suggest that you update or improve something. Our mini-courses will help you to complete these tasks.
You’ll be able to access these courses with both text and video from the WordPress backend. You’ll get practical help in how to create certain pages on your site. What should you write on your About page? How should you set up an FAQ page? Perhaps you created a contact page some time ago and now need to update it. How do you make sure it is good? Our mini-course will give you a hands-on list of what elements a good contact page should have. You can easily check whether your contact page complies with our guidelines and make small improvements if needed.
It can be rather hard to start improving content or write a new page without help. Our mini-courses are designed to help overcome writer’s block and give tips and inspiration on how to create content on your website.
Plan and prioritize
The pro version of the plugin will also allow you to do a little planning. Next to the suggested tasks you’ll find in the free version of the plugin, you’ll be able to set reminders for the things you find most important yourself. This will allow you to take a bit more control over your planning!
Practical workshops
For Pro users of Progress Planners, the webinars surrounding specific topics will be extended with a practical workshop. In addition to the webinar with an expert, we’ll invite our Pro users to our practical workshops. In these workshops, Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt from the Progress Planner team will break down a topic and explain what people should be doing. These workshops shall be interactive, and we’ll have a lot of room for questions from our pro users.
Excited to move forward!
We have so much fun creating progress planner. And we have so many ideas! The plans described in this blog post are our current plans. But I can’t promise that we won’t make any changes. We’re always listening to the opinions of our users and think of ways to improve further. So if you have any more ideas on how to improve Progress Planner? Please let us know!