Marketing won't hurt your project
Your project starts as an itch, and you’ve scratched it. It’s growing at a healthy rate. But wait, while development is the most important aspect of Open Source and Free Software projects, don’t neglect marketing efforts, small effort can yield quite a gain.
The first stop is the project’s web site. A nice looking web site will keep interested parties, while a neglected one might deter them. In a crowded niche this might make all the difference.
I’ll focus on development languages and tools. Take a look at GCC, Free Pascal, Lazarus, Vim and LLVM web sites:
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LLVM
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GCC
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Free Pascal
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Lazarus
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Vim
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LLVM
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GCC
Mostly are blobs of text, with some news. Lazarus, which is an IDE, has no single screenshot of the environment in the home page.
When you have a massive following, or backing, like GCC, LLVM and Vim, it may not present a problem. But Free Pascal and Lazarus web sites are uninviting, and it’s a shame, as they are worthy projects which deserve a lot more attention than they are getting.
Project leaders may say that they’re fine with it, or don’t have resources or backing to invest, but at least allow or delegate to others who have the will to help. This is important for development languages and platforms, many developers will bring extra value to such projects (e.g. bindings to 3rd party libraries).
Now let’s compare it to some other projects with inviting web sites, once again we’ll look at some languages and IDEs.
Take a look at the home pages of Rust, Qt Creator, NetBeans, Ruby, Go and Ninja IDE. As an added bonus I’ve included the Linux kernel page.
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Linux Kernel
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Rust
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Qt Creator
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NetBeans
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Ruby
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Go
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Ninja IDE
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Linux Kernel
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Rust
The designs vary, some are flashy, some are clean and simple, yet those sites do everything that’s needed to get you interested, and once hooked, get started (the Linux kernel page was added as an example of simplicity).
While some have corporate or financial backing, even a relatively small project like Ninja IDE has a great web site. IMHO If they can do such a good job, others can follow.
Even a highly popular (and my favorite) platform like Python doesn’t take things for granted and invests some resources in web site redesign and a great looking Marketing brochure [Direct link to the preview PDF].
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A preview of Python’s brochure
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Python’s current website
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A preview of Python’s website redesign
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A preview of Python’s brochure
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Python’s current website
Go ahead, make your project visitor’s day.
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