Don’t Tell Me, Show Me!
Over on Malarkey’s blog Relly is currently doing a series on posts on how to write copy to convert your audience in to customers. After reading her posts I thought I would chime in with some badly written copy that has been written to target the wrong audience.
modx is, as far as I can work out, some kind of php based framework. However, as a developer who cares about developing websites, after 15 minutes on their site looking for a compelling reason for me to use it all I come away with is some marketing crap about “my clients”.
Even on the page entitled ‘develop’ I was still left wondering what exactly it can do and how it does it.
[…] the MODx project has been concerned (probably overly so) with being a great solution for developers. We still are firmly in that camp today. The resources below should help you get up to speed fast.
The page then goes on to list things such as job listings, the fact they use SVN and a link to the bug tracker. None of these answered the simple questions of: how easy is it to develop using?
Two sites that, as a developer, had me hooked within a couple of moments of finding them were Django and jQuery. On the Django site one of the first links you come across is:
Dive in by reading the overview
This overview shows you real code that can make a Django site run and on first reading its damn easy to make a Django site run. The jQuery website has mastered showing people what makes it awesome as they have this line of code on their homepage:
$("p.neat").addClass("ohmy").show("slow");
With a “run code” button bellow it. In one line and a button they show you how ridiculously easy and quick it is for you to create neat effects and animations. Both of these sites show you their code up front. They don’t hide anything back and it all looks really easy to accomplish something real.
Now I am sure modx is a really good php framework. But in a world with so many php frameworks, having a pretty website is only half the battle, it needs to show developers why its a really good framework.
