Front page of the LESS Web site
You never get a second chance to make a first impression. The old cliche is true, and it applies to the Web sites of FLOSS projects as surely as it does a first date or a job interview. Unfortunately, all too many FLOSS Web sites make a very, very poor first impression. Not surprising, since many FLOSS developers are much more talented at coding than they are at Web site design. How to fix the problem?
Sawyer X writes about "marketing the entire box," and how it relates to Perl, Ruby, Python, and PHP. Specifically, he notes that many Ruby sites have beautiful sites not because they understand how to design sites better, but because they view sites as part of the product:
Ruby programmers see the marketing as relating to not just the product, but its wrapper. That is, that many Ruby programmers understand at a very core level (more than most programmers - at least me) that the website which shows the project is the actual wrapper of the project and is just as important, if not more so.
The same is true of any project. Users and contributors look at a site and form a first impression based on the look of the site before they ever take the time to download code and install it. It's hard not to look at sites like the LESS site or the Banshee Project and think that the projects are going to be solid and more professional because the sites are solid and professional looking. On top of the visual impact, the sites are well-designed and easy to navigate. So when a potential user decides to take the next steps, they can find what they're looking for in a hurry.
But so many sites look amateurish and just plain ugly. Unless you're already motivated to use the project, there's a good chance you're going to turn around and go to the next project. I'm not saying CPAN sites are ugly, by the way -- but the LESS site is far more appealing, wouldn't you agree? Sure, Perl developers may be fine with the existing CPAN design. It's functional. They understand the layout. It's part of the Perl culture, etc. But marketing a project isn't just about making the existing community happy, it's about attracting new members and growing and changing to fit their needs.
Standard CPAN Project Page
I'm glad to see Sawyer X (presumably not his real name) putting out a call for help to beautify Perl projects. On a larger scale, how could the FLOSS community harness the talents of Web designers who might want to contribute to FLOSS projects or simply find projects to showcase their skills? Or perhaps provide some site templates that allow developers to simply plug in details and wind up with a prettified site?
This is a topic that has grabbed my interest not just because of the marketing FLOSS angle, which is important, but also because I've been tweaking my own site design. While it's fun, site design is not one of my core skills. I can mangle HTML just fine, but actually making things look pretty from a Web design angle... not so much one of my strengths. Better resources for site design would be greatly helpful!
5 Comments
What I find is there is a direct correlation between code quality and marketing, if you can't put together a decent website which looks nice, most likely you're not very good at answering emails and most likely your documentation will suck and the quality of your code is appauling.
So good looking sites tend to reflect the developer as a person and what they are like behind the text editor, if they put effort into the site, most likely they put effort into the design and programming as well, most likely it'll look quite decent, the integration between marketing and code quality is very solid.
so there you go, being as it may that most perl quality is unreadable jibberish that just so happens to work, I fully expect their website to look like a sack of sh*t, makes perfect sense to me.
chris
@Christopher I don't fully agree there. Some projects have wonderful code and work well, but have pretty drab or ugly sites. I mean, just as an example, the GNU Website could use some prettying up, but the actual code - solid. Rock solid. And good docs.
And the attack on Perl as a whole is unfair, and really not necessary.
Ironically, this article is an example of what the author is criticizing. I get a little blue rectangle to the right side of the article that floats to remind me to register (or something - the text is very small) and to use Flash (for a text article???). Very irritating. Practice what you preach!!
Dave,
I have to agree with you, there are a lot of bad open source we sites out there. Back when I was a windows user and merely trying out different distributions, the web site was one of the factors that made me want to try a distro. As an example, i'v never tried Debian, even though i'v known about it for 8-9 years. I didn't know much about it back then, but frankly the web site looks like something I made in grade 10 computer class. I do eventually want to try Debian, but only because of all the good reviews and comments i'v heard over the years, not from the first impression that the site gives me. This is the primary reason I used Suse for so long and eventually went to (K)Ubuntu, they have professional looking sites. I know that the quality of a web site tells nothing about the quality of the product, but it's true that first impressions matter. I'f 'm searching distrowatch fora new distro and I come across a site that looks like a 12 year old made it, i'm just gonna keep looking.
Personally I think the sites are nicer because alot of these frameworks like RoR allow people that are more focused on graphical design to write fairly solid apps without a great understanding of how to write good code. The apps may be visually appealing but usually aren't something "out of the box" of what the framework is built to do. The more complex the actual app the less likely you are to see a beautiful front end unless there are a lot of developers or you have graphics people working on it.