Halogen TalentSpace (discontinued) vs. WordPress

I think it's a good platform for tracking and monitoring goals, feedback, and development. We don't use the 1:1 meeting feature, however, I can see how that would be valuable for many organizations. I do like that it is very customizable, however, that also presents problems in that sometimes forms and/or processes can be a bit challenging to create easily and quickly.

Wordpress is a great solution for a website of nearly any type. It may not be as suitable if a fully custom solution or app is needed, and it does have some limitations when it comes to connecting it to external products (especially if the product doesn't have any support from a native system), and it does require a lot of testing. Multiple plugins in one install are common but also increase the risk of conflicts, and when those do occur, it can be exceptionally time-consuming and tedious to identify what is causing the issue. As third parties create many plugins, you're also at risk with each potential security breach, which needs to be kept in mind. I would be cautious to use WordPress to store any sort of sensitive PPI. That said, it's a wonderful, easily customizable solution for many, many different types of websites and can allow even inexperienced client users with low-tech knowledge to update basics.

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• 1:1 agendas are easy to create, add comments to and prompt excellent conversation flow on the topics that truly matter to the manager and the employee.
• The system can be easily customized to reflect your company's language and culture. We did this in several areas of the platform (goals, development, learning), and it made a world of difference in the understanding and adaptation of our users. One example is that in each learning module, we added 3 questions in the course description so that managers would be automatically prompted to ask to follow up / learning transfer questions when their employees enroll and take a learning course.
• Halogen support is outstanding. Any question I have had has been answered upon the first contact or within 24 hours.

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• Easy to use User Interface
• Coding / Plugin Implementation is awesome
• There's always a solution available for the platform
• Security is easy to use and robust
• Implementation with 3rd party platforms, such as Google's variety of tools
• Can download and host on your own server or use their hosted servers

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• My organization does not use all of the functions/modules that Halogen offers, but I find that those modules still appear on the Halogen main page. I think a great area for improvement is to hide these functions so as not to confuse employees.

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• WordPress breaks often so you need to have someone who understands how to troubleshoot, which can take time and money.
• Some plugins are easier to customize than others, for example, some don't require any coding knowledge while others do. This can limit your project if you are not a coder.
• WordPress can be easily hacked, so you also need someone who can ensure your sites are secure.

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Implementing a new system and process company wide is never an easy task. We moved so quickly in such a short period of time that we were able to learn quickly but also have the opportunity to improve the Halogen experience. We will more than likely will renew our use of Halogen as we already are seeing a small impact which hopefully in the long run will lead to a greater impact

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The complications we have and the lack of support. Every plugin has a differente team of support in charge and make one plugin work with the other one always affects the website performance. It's a thousand times better to have only one provider with all functionalities included unless you are an expert web developer or have a team dedicated to it

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Halogen is very intuitive and provides very clean work-space ... lots of white space and modern layouts. There is more than one way to accomplish your action, too!

Extremely easy to use and train users. It took very little time to get everyone trained and onboarded to start using WordPress. Anytime we had any issues, we were able to find an article or video to help out or we were able to contact support. The menu options are well laid out so it is easy to find what you are looking for.

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Anyone can visit WordPress.org and download a fully functional copy of WordPress free of charge. Additionally, WordPress is offered to users as open-source software, which means that anyone can customize the code to create new applications and make these available to other WordPress users.

Mostly, any performance issues have to do with using too many plugins and these can sometimes slow down the overall performance of your site. It is very tempting to start adding lots of plugins to your WordPress site, however, as there are thousands of great plugins to choose from and so many of them help you do amazing things on your site. If you begin to notice performance issues with your WordPress site (e.g. pages being slow to load), there are ways to optimize the performance of your site, but this requires learning the process. WordPress users can learn how to optimize their WordPress sites by downloading the WPTrainMe WordPress training plugin (WPTrainMe.com) and going through the detailed step-by-step WordPress optimization tutorials.

We only purchased the appraisal module and without the other modules offered, you are really limited in what you can do and the process becomes much more involved with needing to maintain information across multiple platforms. We found that they charge for everything and call it "consulting." We poured so much money and time into a system that was just overkill for what we really needed.

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I give this rating, which I believe to be a great rating for a community based support system that's surrounding it. Most platforms and products have their own, and as WordPress does have their own team that help here and there, a lot of it's handled by community involvement with dedicated users who are experts with the system who love to help people.

Varies by the person providing training. High marks as it's incredibly easy to find experienced individuals in your community to provide training on any aspect of WordPress from content marketing, SEO, plugin development, theme design, etc. Less than 10 though as the training is community based and expectations for a session you find may fall short.

It is very easy to use and I can do my own programming instead of paying a technician and waiting sometimes days for them to program the changes.

It is very easy to find online resources to learn how to do just about anything with WordPress.

Get to know your CAM - Customer Account Manager! They are a lifesaver! (Thanks Jorie Basque!)

WordPress is not a great solution if you have: 1) A larger site with performance / availability requirements. 2) Multiple types of content you want to share - each with its own underlying data structure. 3) Multiple sites you need to manage. For very small sites where these needs are not paramount, WordPress is a decent solution

I have used other systems in the past and I like that Halogen provides everything in one space. I would like to see a more developed way to report training, not in the LMS, but I think that for the most part that Halogen is a robust system that is superior to its competition.

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WordPress isn't as pretty or easy to use as certain competitors like Jimdo, Squarespace or HubSpot, but it makes up for it with its affordability, familiarity and the ability to find quality outside help easily. The same can't be said for certain competitors, as you might need to find an expert and it could get costly.

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WordPress is completely scalable. You can get started immediately with a very simple "out-of-the box" WordPress installation and then add whatever functionality you need as and when you need it, and continue expanding. Often we will create various WordPress sites on the same domain to handle different aspects of our strategy (e.g. one site for the sales pages, product information and/or a marketing blog, another for delivering products securely through a private membership site, and another for running an affiliate program or other application), and then ties all of these sites together using a common theme and links on each of the site's menus. Additionally, WordPress offers a multisite function that allows organizations and institutions to manage networks of sites managed by separate individual site owners, but centrally administered by the parent organization. You can also expand WordPress into a social networking or community site, forums, etc. The same scalability applies to web design. You can start with a simple design and then scale things up to display sites with amazing visual features, including animations and video effects, sliding images and animated product image galleries, elements that appear and fade from visitor browsers, etc. The scaling possibilities of WordPress are truly endless.

• We are able to get our reviews done in a quicker amount of time. Instead of 4-8 weeks we were able to get it done under a month.
• Halogen has gotten better at given us a heads up when the system will be down. Most patches are done overnight so we can at least verify it was done, but their success rate of a patch not breaking something is not at 99%. So we do lose productivity when the system is down.
• The tool is easier to do so there are fewer questions from users outside the core team.

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• Allowed us to being all websites under a single umbrella, saving costs on similar products.
• It's increased our website turn time and made us faster and more efficient at launching websites.
• Edits and tweaks happen much faster as we have a customized environment.

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