FunderThunder

This project concerns the creation of a infrastructure and service which will allow consumers & businesses to rapidly and easily create professional and appealing web sites leveraging open source technologies.

So yes, there are a number of services out there that offer “instant” web site creation such as Weebly, Intuit, Homestead, et al. Many of these are very good and offer quite sophisticated user interfaces for easy drag & drop site creation.  In essence they offer a combination of “Site Design” and a “Content Management System (CMS)”. The drawback of all these services is that you are restricted to the features and functionality offered by each individual service. In some cases this may be fine, in others you will find yourself limited, and fundamentally they fail to leverage the power and extensibility of open source driven solutions.

On the flip side you have some very powerful Open Source content Management Systems such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal as examples.  All of these platforms are well supported by the open source community with thousands of free and reasonably priced extensions that expand their functionality. Even out of the box they offer a powerful platform to build a fully featured site. Unfortunately, while most computer literate users can learn how to edit their content, add pages, etc, this level of user still has a hard time working though the initial setup and configuration of these platforms. From a site design perspective, one can purchase templates and themes for them, but again it often requires more knowledge that the casual user has or is prepared to learn.  As a web developer I know this first hand. Many of my clients are quite happy to manage their own sites once I have preconfigured everything for them, but they would be totally lost if they were doing this from scratch.

So, what I am proposing in this project is to create an infrastructure that provides the same user friendly and accessible site creation mechanisms that the aforementioned sites offer (Weebly, Intuit, et al ), but builds this on top of the users choice of open source CMS. This way the user ends up with a preconfigured open source CMS solution per their selected design, and they have something that is manageable and that they become familiar with and not a computer science degree to figure out how to set it up in the first place. The ultimate power of this solution is that then the user is free to expand the functionality of their site by adding any of the many available extensions and widgets for these platforms and they are no longer constrained by a closed solution. It’s also envisioned that the infrastructure could also pre-configure a number of popular and robust extensions based on the users preferences.

This project will be both a “give back to the open source” community, and also a commercial endeavor to provide a turnkey hosted environment where consumers and businesses will be able to rapidly deploy attractive, functional, and extensible web sites leveraging the power of open source software.

This project is quite large in scope, just creating sufficient good initial site designs that users can choose from will be significant. These will then have to be built into a framework that allows the user to configure their site and the automatically create the chosen open source CMS instance of their site. I am hoping to raise sufficient funds to at least create a proof of concept, and ideally complete a first phase product launch.

I am offering the following rewards:

$25 – 3 month access to premium service

$50 – 6 month access to premium service

$100 – 12 month access to premium service

$250 - 12 month access to premium service, plus 25% discount on web development services (could be worth significantly more than $250) and will be available immediately. Contact me to learn more and discuss your web development requirements.

About me:

I have over twenty five years of senior management and engineering development expertise in Information Technology, Internet Technologies, and Embedded Systems. With comprehensive experience in full life cycle management of multi-site global development groups, and a solid track record of creating very effective, scalable organizations.

I have held the following notable positions:

VP, Advanced System Products

VP, High Availability Applications

Director, Software Engineering

Director, System Architecture & Research

Senior Software Development Manager

Senior Software Program Manager

Senior Software Program Manager

Distinguished Member of Technical Staff

Chief System Architect

I currently work as an independent consultant and owner/operator of a internet consulting company focusing on implementing Web Based Solutions for businesses, and I have extensive experience of developing and managing projects utilizing php, mysql, javascript, AJAX, Java, xhtml/css as well as many other internet/web technologies including SEO strategies.

I hold a Master’s of Science in Computer Science, a Bachelors of Science in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, and a Master’s of Business Administration (MBA).