Open letter to Pair.com

Pair Support:
I’m coming from Movable Type, where I’ve had a horrifying experience. My impression is you have to be an engineer to build, maintain a blog using MT. Everywhere MT forum denizens pointed I felt I was opening an engineering tome in the middle; automatically lost. Mountains of verbiage and a few lines of code. Nothing visual. No step-by-step. Engineers writing for engineers. Even the Sixapart forums were unfriendly and have stopped answering my posts.

I want to reiterate and add to my complaints I made before about MT. I understand Pair’s original mission to offer solid web site tools for the business world; however, you have users like me, who are not engineers working for corporate entities. We do not understand HTML so well that we can effectively build a blog without a beginner-friendly, visual how-to manual, and support geared to people like us.

You can gain more respect, a more faithful usership, and grow your customer base if you were to natively offer, not only MT but, non-corporate, individual user-oriented platforms, like WordPress. My frustrating experiences with MT has caused me to sign up for a WordPress account; however, it is not native on my domain. All this leaves me, and I’ll bet countless thousands, in the yawning gap between professional engineers and low tech users who simply want to get something up on the web.

Therefore I want you to cancel my Movable Type account. Take it off of the root of my server.

Sincerely,

The open letter summarizes my experiences with my domain provider; and illustrates the challenges IBLI instructors face getting a blog up on the web. It is possible, but customizability varies in a wide variety of situations. From the most HTML savvy to rank beginner, the continuum looks like this: Building HTML from scratch and uploading it onto your domain; building a Movable Type blog and uploading it onto your domain; building a sight with WYSIWYG software and uploading it onto your domain; building a web-based blog and uploading it to its hosted site.

A colleague who is more adept at web applications has built what I call a faux blog. With Dreamweaver he has customized a web page to look like a blog. The benefits are:

• Limited issues with HTML tinkering
• Fully customizable; you may even use the sidebars for small photos, a list of what you’re reading, a list of what’s on your iPod; favorite quotes, slogans; change colors and cell designs throughout
• Commentary may be enabled with a Twitter widget

As I am not adept at blogging, I cannot say what the limiting factors might be.