Recently there’s a very interesting thread in Planet Perl about marketing or we suck at web design:
- Marketing the Entire Box (including the wrapper)
- More design love please…
- On Nagios, Thunk, Shinken and wrapper included marketing
I fully agree with those posts: the picture you show about your project is as important as the project itself. I think this is true in all the RoR projects I’ve seen so far. In fact, looking for a Trac substitute, I knew Redmine was a RoR application just for its appearance (well, I was lucky… it could have been a Django based application as well hehe).
How many times you have tried an application because of the screenshots? Yes, it looks cool, let’s make a try.
The problem is that not every developer has the skills or the good taste to make a cool website to support his project, and that sadly may affect the project success.
So, I bet there are good designers out there that want to contribute to the open source community. Would you adopt a project or developer?
PS: I would have liked to post a comment in the cited posts, but I don’t have an account. You guys should think about allowing comments of non-registered users.
