Beautiful projects deserve beautiful sites

[ Thanks to Joe Brockmeier for this link. ]

"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."

Complete Story

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