Hi;

I have noticed pretty significant gaps in the steps instructions and in the preceding / following information for many of the more advanced steps. It seems better for simpler steps but often steps and other information are not provided when it is needed the most. I guess it is pretty disturbing given that it is well documented information and simply needs to be typed in from the books you must have.

I have also noticed that errors which are pointed out are not corrected.

Are you going to fix this and when?

Best Regards ... Kim

Hi Kim,

Yes indeed, this website is -- and on some level, will always be -- a work in progress. We've been adding written information to the syllabus slowly but surely over the last decade (In fact, it started out as purely written information with no videos). But we've reached a little bit of a tricky spot in our evolution, a point in time where the syllabus is not yet complete, but it's close enough that instead of appearing as a ever growing body of work, it might appear, particularly to someone just joining us now, that we're flawed and piecemeal, that we have things that need "fixing". It's a tough phase, but we're pushing through it as fast as we can.

Rest assured that we do add information regularly. We're actually a small, home-based business, not a large company with investors and loads of capital to drop on hiring a staff to accelerate our growth (at least not so far, anyway). Most of the income from sales of memberships goes into producing more videos, because that's what people who pay for memberships are paying for primarily. Video editing is going much more slowly than video production, so we just shifted our expenses over to editing at the beginning of this year, and hopefully that will have an impact on how quickly things appear to be moving.

That leaves the adding of written content primarily to me at the moment, which I'm trying to balance with programming and website development. And although the development is getting a much larger slice of my attention right now (Check out http://new.ballroomdancers.com/ to see what's just around the corner), I do still spend at least one session per week (and often as many as 2-3) on the written syllabus. You can monitor my progress currently by watching the Gold international syllabus, man's and lady's parts. Waltz is now done, and I'm currently finishing up Tango, with Foxtrot and Quickstep coming next. I'm now working specifically on the charts, after which I will go back to do overviews and descriptions, with precedes and follows coming last. After standard I'll be moving on to rhythm, which is now the least developed of the styles.

If progress appears slower than it should on the man's and lady's charts, it's also partly because I'm adding more information than you can see on the current version of BallroomDancers.com. Currently we have 4 columns of very basic information (Step #, timing, description and notes), whereas in the database I've actually been adding full, detailed technique, including footwork, alignments, amounts of turn, rise & fall, etc. And that takes much longer to work on than the old, simple version. This additional technique will not be visible to the general public until I finish building the new website, http://new.ballroomdancers.com/, which is part of why I'm spending so much more of my time building that.

So please bear with us, and rest assured that work is being done every day not just to complete the syllabus, but to improve this website in many different ways. We are right on the cusp of some very big changes, and when they arrive, it should be much more obvious just how much love is being poured into this business every day.

Regards,
Jonathan Atkinson
BallroomDancers.com