The Mighty Blog - The personal web site for Will Strohl - DotNetNuke Popularity

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Posted by: Will Strohl	10/26/2007
A while ago, I tested the popularity and name recognition of DotNetNuke against some of the other CMS products out there. Being a fan and loyal user/developer of DotNetNuke projects (not the Core projects), I was quite disappointed. A while ago, I tested the popularity and name recognition of DotNetNuke against some of the other CMS products out there. Being a fan and loyal user/developer of DotNetNuke projects (not the Core projects), I was quite disappointed. Back then, nearly all web-based CMS applications that I could think of was scoring higher on Google Trends. Well, here we are several months later, and nothing has changed. http://www.google.com/trends?q=DotNetNuke%2C+joomla%2C+drupal&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 The DotNetNuke Team really needs to step up their SEO skills and get DNN on the map in a much larger way. DotNetNuke is out-searched in every market in the world. I am not going to turn this post into a "why you should use DNN", but having used this CMS and also used others, this is clearly the best product in a variety of ways. With almost 10 years of web development experience under my belt, I would hope that would mean something to you. :) Or not... This is my official plea to the DNN Core Team Members out there... Place a greater emphasis in name recognition (branding), and search engine optimization. We certainly could, and definitely should be beating the other CMS products out there by now.
Copyright ©2007 Will Strohl
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Re: DotNetNuke Popularity - Revisited

By mamlin on 11/1/2007

I don't think it's -quite- as bad as the 'Trends' results would indicate, though I completely agree with you that the DNN team needs to do some serious stewardship work beyond the usual (and much apprieciated) additions/improvements to the core/projects. WHY IT'S NOT -QUITE- THAT BAD (Trends results): DotNetNuke is so often referred to as "DNN" that it would be a mistake not to also include "DNN" as a Trends search term. I know "DNN" can refer to plenty of other topics ("Disaster News Network" or the "Dineson Mines" stock ticker, to name a couple) but a Google search on "DNN" shows nearly all DotNetNuke-related links for the first several pages and for pretty much ALL of the AdSense sidebar ads. While not perfect, I believe combining Trends results for "DNN" and "DotNetNuke" would be a lot more accurate than not including "DNN" at all. IT'S STILL NOT NEARLY AS GOOD AS IT SHOULD BE: I recently attempted to gauge how active the various DNN User Groups were across the state of Texas and, like you with 'Trends', was similarly dissapointed in the low number of active members for these (free) groups. The Houston group in particular had only single-digit turnouts (low single digits, at that) for several of its most recent meetings. Houston?!? Houston is the 4th most populous city in the US! Where are the DNN users? The topics covered in the Houston meetings were great -- I would have loved to have attended if i lived in Houston. Somehow the DNN interest level remains exceptionally low. Perhaps the question at hand is: How do we as end-users (admins, developers, etc) bring focus to the need for general DNN promotion and put pressure on the DNN Core Team to make additional efforts in promoting the platform? Great topic, by the way -- thanks for blogging about it and focusing some attention on the subject.

Re: DotNetNuke Popularity - Revisited

By wills on 11/1/2007

I completely agree and you bring up great dialog here. Perhaps the end-users *should* pick up some of that slack. But now we need to figure out how. Also, that is a great point with using "DNN" in Trends. It will be interesting to see how it does, since it is obviously an ambiguous term. I have been growing continuously aggravated at the User Group myself. I live in a suburb of a somewhat major city, and we cannot seem to get enough people interested to validate our first meeting. :(

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