[TYPO3-UG US] US Marketing Plan

[Duffy, Chris]

Hello!

I am in a situation similar to Virgil. I am the web developer for the
Distance Learning Department at a Community College District with 45,000
students. We began using Typo3 9 months ago. (It was not my idea.) It
has been difficult to figure out using the online documentation. I
recently bought the book, which helped. But the "softlinks" mentioned in
the book that I have tried do not work yet.

In addition, I have a side business designing/maintaining websites. My
hosing service has Fantastico so I have installed Typo3 on several of
these domains. I am hopeful that I will figure out how to use everything
because of how far I have come since purchasing the book. I am beginning
to like it. :-)

I would like to see a forum of some kind where users/developers can work
thru problems or offer support. I use PHP on some of my sites and there
is a lot of support forums for PHP. I can search for PHP + my problem or
error number and I receive many pages of potentially helpful
information. 

I realize that this thread is supposed to be about Marketing, not
support. But Virgil's post prompted my reply. 

Regards,
Chris Duffy
Houston, Texas

-----Original Message-----
From: typo3-ug-us-bounces at lists.netfielders.de
[mailto:typo3-ug-us-bounces at lists.netfielders.de] On Behalf Of virgil
huston
Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2005 2:34 PM
To: TYPO3 Usergroup America
Subject: Re: [TYPO3-UG US] US Marketing Plan

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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