NYCPHP Meetup

[Web Project]

Want to expand the Joomla-verse? Tired of having sand kicked on you by smaller CMS folks? Here are my prescriptions:

"Volume wins." People very very often go with the leader. And that means the volume leader. Plus, the leader in the market automatically creates the largest ecosystem and attracts the most developers, consultants, extensions, etc. So for Joomla, that means telling (and *showing*) people we're the leader.

Joomla.org should feature the number of downloads per month top and center--updated every month. And include a drill-down page that shows the historic downloads per month on a graph. 

Other important numbers that should be on the front page or very visible:
* Number of Joomla consultants
* Number of Joomla days in the last 12 months and a link to a calendar of upcoming events.
* Number of Joomla books (also, see photo idea below). Plus reviews of the books on the site.
* Number of extensions
* Number of live sites obtained by Googling for the Joomla meta tag. Of course, the actual number will be even higher since the figure won't include intranet sites. Use an asterisk to explain this tidbit. Use a ticker to save real estate.

Move the Joomla community, security and Joomla Developers sections of the front page to an interior page. The front page should be focused:
* Tell people what Joomla is, that it is the leader, that they can use it by themselves or there are consultants who will help them.  People need to know that Joomla is the best answer for creating a web site that a, b or c. (I'll leave it to you all to best define a, b and c.)

Currently, the "one-liner" about Joomla (which should be on the front page but isn't) is "Joomla makes creating and maintaining Web sites easy for everyone, from total beginners setting up their first site to IT professionals managing enterprise installations."  That's good, but could use additional work. Has it been tested with mainstream people? Perhaps divide the section in two, one for "Web site beginners," another for "IT Pros" and list the Joomla benefits to each under the heading. Look at other sites to see how they simply, yet powerfully tell people why their product should be used. Eg http://basecamphq.com/  -- notice the photos and videos!

* A VERY important issue for any tech product is to "Cross the Chasm" (see the book by Geoffrey Moore). This is the issue that most people ("mainstream" people) do not trust visionaries' recommendations. Mainstream people want to get their jobs done and they trust recommendations from other mainstream people. What this means for Joomla: I believe that Joomla has successfully crossed the chasm. This is a very powerful feature of Joomla. Exploit it by featuring stories on the Joomla site about ordinary web sites that are using Joomla successfully. Even a 5 line story would be very good. The Joomla consultants should be able to feed stories about their successful Joomla deployments to the Joomla.org site. 

As I mention above, I suggest moving the Open Source developers / OS community stuff off of the Joomla front page. Maybe way-off the front page to a sub-site such as community.joomla.org. Why? Once you've crossed the chasm, the HUGE market of the mainstream lies in front of you. And most of that market does NOT want to be part of the Joomla Open Source community. Instead, they want to be part of the Joomla Happy Users Community who Solved Their Problems by Using Joomla. Focus on the latter and the former will also continue to grow. Focus on the OS community, and you'll slow the growth of the general users community. Why? Because most people have much more interest in attending a Joomla day vs doing the OS community work of planning it, running it, etc. To me, that's ok. And to not recognize that the mainstream is quite different than the open source / early adopter / visionary market would mean that Joomla would not grow as fast as it can and should.
 (Read Moore's book for details on the above. Highly recommended for any technologist who cares about the number of people using his or her product / project etc.)

Mainstream people want references from their own industry. This means that the pages on the Joomla site that list Joomla sites should be divided by industry. A mainstream person in the building industry wants to know that other builders (of any sort) are using Joomla. I couldn't convince a religious org that it should use Joomla because I couldn't quickly find a ref site (of a religious org) for them to look at.

Marketing takes time. No immediate miracles. But it does need to be a focus.

A couple of last ideas for this msg:
* The large number of Joomla books is a major deal. I suggest piling ALL of the Joomla books on top of each other, with their spines visible. Put the Joomla 1.0 books at the bottom. Then put that photo on the Joomla front page too. -- I note that currently there are no photos on the Joomla.org page other than two tiny photos of Ron S and a photo of a Joomla backpack. -- ** not good ** (They should all be removed.)

Instead, there should be photos of the Joomla books, and photos and videos (short!) of Joomla days, with their captions: Joomla Day in New York City, in xyz, etc. Also videos of happy mainstream Joomla users, etc. Use carousel widgets to display multiple photos. Use news tickers to make things more dynamic. Eg news ticker of sites using Joomla.

Hope this is of help.... 

Please forward it to the Joomla insiders who may not be on this list.

Go Joomla!

Larry
(My degree is in engineering, and I was a developer for a number of years. I then switched to marketing sw at Sun, Remedy and other tech companies.)
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