shep wrote: > I agree with Randy. As an average user, there is nothing to draw me > to habari that I can't find elsewhere. Yes, it has a great looking > admin. Yes, the system doesn't get in the way of writing. Habari > makes blogging easy, but i'd be willing to be that most people don't > want something that just makes blogging easy. They want something > that makes having a great looking blog easy. Until there is work done > in theme (configuration options, modules/widgets/whatever you want to > call them) habari will lack the wow factor for the average user. I > never want to touch my theme files unless it's an absolute last > result, and the amount of work that needs to be done to a theme to > display what you want it to (via the various plugins) is like how > wordpress was before they introduced widgets. And I definitely don't > want to go back to that. I think a lot of you, too often, think like > coders and not average users, which is great for the technical aspect > of habari, and makes it a superior product tech-wise, but a little > thought and consideration needs to be given to Joe Blogger, the guy > who wants to move away from wordpress or blogger, or movable type. > Looking at the Habari website today (before I even saw this thread) i > couldn't help but wonder, why should i be using this? i looked at the > section on why Habari is different, but none of that matters to me (in > the sense that it makes me want to move over, i'm sure it does > matter). That information is not the wow factor for most people.
FAIL. Ok, so what do we need to do? Personally, I know that themes need work. That's why I've been advocating 0.7 for focusing on the needs of themes, and encouraging the delay of a theme competition until that time. The reason to delay it until 0.7 is because focusing on ACL features for 0.6 will allow us to create an infrastructure for hosting the themes created for the improvements in 0.7. I've been asking for advice from themers on how to make Habari easier to work with so that we can "Habarify" those ideas. If we can plan out these features now, we'll be able to implement them solidly in 0.7. You are absolutely right that we often focus too much on the tech and not enough on the user when trying to market Habari. While I think that saying things about Habari's code is useful, I completely agree that we don't say enough things to get real, regular users into the mix. This is one thought that spawned my initial message of this thread; that by highlighting our favorite features, maybe other people would find those features interesting too. A major thing that the marketing research I've been doing has convinced me is that Habari need not be the best at what it does. We also need not convince potential users that Habari is technically competent, since that would be obvious at first use, and beyond the surface, people probably don't really care. No, what we really need to do (simplified) is one of two things: 1) Be first to do something. 2) Be the viable second-place alternative to the product that was first to do a thing. Doing #1 is hard. I think that the thing we're first at - being blogging "reborn"/"rethought" - is weak, but really what we're about. Of course, unless you care that we're thinking about what blogging is, you won't care that we were first to build an application for blogging thinking that we were writing a "blogging application". (No really, consider that when all of the other tools out there were being built, did they call it "blogging" and were they built to do exactly that, or did it evolve into blogging from some other idea?) Doing #2 has challenges, too. We'll need to attack the product in teh primary slot to eventually fill that slot ourselves. And not by saying, "X product sucks, look at how it sucks," but by saying, "Habari does Y really well, but X still doesn't. Why are you using X?" It's hard, and it's necessary that we take aim at the right target. I think that we need to do less of what I did to start this thread - suggest small promotional actions with no real focus - and come up with a thorough plan for putting Habari where it should be, by both including the features that users need and promoting it effectively. If someone wants to come up with a more comprehensive plan for how to promote Habari to a #1 or comfortable #2 spot, that would be ideal. Owen --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/habari-dev -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
