FAQ

"Why can't I ... with the MV Pro platform?"

When building a website, there are a lot of components that make things seem easy. When we consider some of the beloved, reputable site building platforms like Squarespace, Wordpress, and others, it gets easy to wonder: if I can do X, Y, and Z in those platforms, why can't I do the same things in the MV Pro platform?

Template site builders

Like so many things, website builders (to put it simply) fall onto a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum lie platforms that offer three different templated site styles, a bundle of customizations like color palette for your theme & a font pack, and feature limits – let's say you max out at 50 pages. On those platforms, you as a user know exactly what you get to use, because the offerings will never change. They may be improved over time, but there is a limit on customization and personalization. That cap, depending on the bundle and/or price point, is pretty low to the ground.

With these template site builders, your technical knowledge needs not go beyond the knowledge required to use the internet on a computer. Drag and drop! Click to choose! And just like that, you have a website – a website that looks like 6,000 other websites, down to the font, layout and color scheme.

Fully customizable site builders

At the opposite end of this website builder spectrum lies a fully customizable website builder. With this, you as a client pay anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 for someone to take every request you submit and build you a website. However, not only must your budget be able to handle a price like that, your technical knowledge must also be able to handle customizations of this scale. When you have no idea how to interact with certain features, or have no idea how something is built, you run the risk of falling out of control with your site's upkeep. You may not know how often certain features are updated – you may not even have access to update certain things yourself.

Configurable: the MV Pro platform

The Membership Vision Pro platform is what we call configurable, based on the following criteria:

• You decide how certain features and modules are used, alongside the MV team's informed advice on how to best leverage the platform.
• Any feature added to the platform that hasn't been commissioned for private use is available to all clients once we push updates out.
• You're not on your own like you would be with a template site, nor have you given full control over to someone like you would with a fully customizable site: anything that the MV Pro platform does for your website, we can train you on.

We also think it's important to note that before merging with Learning Forte!, Membership Vision was primarily a team of two! At the start of this article, I stated that there are many components that make site building seem easy – you can see your choices reflected immediately after you make them (remember to click Update!) in the platform. All changes and updates are built by our developers as we assess demand, priorities, and developer capacity. The work that goes into making the MV Pro platform features available for you to configure is not insignificant.

One of Learning Forte!'s primary moving objectives with Membership Vision has been creating processes that are helpful and sustainable for both team members and clients, and that takes both a ton of time and a ton of work! In the spirit of compassionate honesty, we can't get everything done overnight, or address huge fixes within the week – but we can (and do!) work really hard to assess and prioritize so that the platform and its ecosystem is maintained sustainably.