Community @ The Turning Gate

tom1983

Member

Registered: 2014-09-25

Posts: 16

Review

I’ve been using CE4 for about 5 months now and the time has come to write a quick review. I don’t usually write reviews but I am so impressed it would be rude not to!

Our site previously used a feature rich gallery software but it was very 1990s, did not support mobile devices and due to the size of our database (1-2 million photos) the page load times were unbearably slow, sometimes a minute or so if it didn’t time out. It was also very expensive, approx £1000 + expensive annual support contract.

Since upgrading to CE4 we have seen around 50% increase in online sales. I think this is primarily due to the support for mobile devices and speed of the site. Although our database is much smaller than the old site (150,000 photos) the page load times remain very fast. It’s easy to navigate and looks great on all devices.

The only site I’ve set up before was a text site about 20 years ago, however as a newbie I found the plugins intuitive with good supporting documentation. They make it easy to produce a professional looking site for people with no web design experience.

The ease of uploading photos via the publisher plugin has also saved about 4 hours work a week as it can be left to run after the photos are edited. The shopping cart is very user friendly and works great with digital downloads which make up the majority of our sales. We used to receive regular complaints about difficulty downloading photos, since the change to TTG we get maybe 1 or 2 a week from some less computer literate customers.

The support provided by Matt & Ben is second to none and best of all is free! We recently added a woocommerce shopping cart to the site and I was pleased to find that support for this was added to the Wordpress theme on request from a single customer. You don’t get that kind of support elsewhere. When we launched the site we also needed some custom coding done to add support for multiple watermarks. It was done in 2 days and very reasonably priced.

Overall I can’t believe that CE4 works so well, is constantly being developed and costs so little. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to our website.

Keep up the good work guys, you have no idea how much it’s appreciated.

Cheers

Tom

http://seeyourselfonline.com

Last edited by tom1983 (2015-04-28 05:59:40)

Matthew

Administrator

From: San Francisco, CA

Registered: 2012-09-24

Posts: 5,795

Website

Re: Review

Thanks, Tom! That's a tremendous review, and we much appreciate it.

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Matt

The Turning Gate, http://theturninggate.net