[TYPO3-UG US] US Marketing Plan

[virgil huston]

Guess it is time to put my two cents in :-) I am happy to see activity
on the US list. I may bring a slightly different perspective to the
discussion and my main point in writing this is to see if my
situation/ideas fit into the overall vision the group has. If so,
great, if not, no loss.

I am not a developer/programmer. I have lots of tech skills, but I am
a web designer/content manager. I do this part time, so time is
precious. I shut down my buisiness for 18 months when I got deployed
to Iraq and now that I am back I basically am only doing freelance
work for a political consultant doing campaign and issue web sites.

I would love to use Typo3, I think it would be perfect. But I don't
have the time or maybe technical expertise to figure out how to use
it. The documentation is very confusing and typical of problems it
seems all open source projects have. Like I said, I am pretty tech
savvy, but I have never been able to figure out sourceforge, for
example. Its an insiders game and this limits acceptance by the
masses. It took me three full days to finally get one of the Typo3
packages installed and all the tutorials addressed a different package
that I could never get to work. Anyway, I gave up.

Excuse the length of this, but here is what I would like to see:

1) Better documentation, or perhaps I mean better organized
documentation. All I know is that the documentation was a show stopper
for me
2) Better packages for installation or maybe a better description of
what each one is for
3) I could add things that increase user friendliness for
administrators and users, but you get the idea.

The above said, the real question for me is what exactly does this
group want. Are you looking to develop TYPO3 in the US so you can
increase your business? That is fine and would probably mean you
wouldn't want installation, set up, and administration to be easier.
Do you want this to be an easy out of the box solution that people
like me could figure out? I would like that, but that would cost you
business.

Or perhaps the answer is some kind of collaboration between people
like me and the developers, something in between the above options? I
would love to be able to use TYPO3, but I just don't have the time to
learn everything on my own.

Thanks,
Virgil Huston

On 10/13/05, Equivity <equivity at gmail.com> wrote:
> I would like to put my 2 cents in on the marketing plan for typo. I own and operate a web hosting company, and design firm. As part
> of my hosting companies offerings we provide customers with Fantastico (php auto installer) and included with that is the ability to
> auto install typo. There are thousands of hosting companies, like myself, with fantastico. I feel that a marketing plan which does
> not include some kind of partnership program, or incentives, or something for all these hosting companies to help push people to
> using typo would be remised.  One way to get hosting companies to help push the use of typo is to offer some free tutorials they can
> set up on there sites that users can view to get a better idea of how to use typo, or some type of partnership program, or free
> templates they can offer customers. Because if we can make it as easy as possible for hosting customers to configure and operate
> typo once it is installed (since the install is all automated now) we will find more and more companies and individuals using it.
>
>
> Chris
>
>
>
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