Re: What we really need...
- Posted by irv at take.maxleft.com Nov 13, 2002
- 476 views
On Tuesday 12 November 2002 06:58 pm, Thomas wrote: > You may not go to the web site for the web site itself, but I tend to > see a web site like the front of a building. If you see a façade that > looks like it hasn't been touched for 5 years, it's not going to matter > that there are freshly baked cookies behind the broken glass and spider > webs. Exactly. It's an image thing. RDS' website appears to be static (only the contrib page changes regularly). Compare this with, for example http://www.perl.com What do you see first? Right down the middle of the page, an ever-changing selection of news, opinion and mini-tutorials on language features. That gives the impression that people are busy using, and improving, perl. First impressions are important - you may never get a chance to make a second one. > I think that if we can get a better layout for the site that promotes > the archive, support (chat and forums) and learning materials a bit > more, then there's a better chance of people staying at the site and > learning more about the language before pounding into the download link > thinking it's a miracle language. It's not, but it *is* extremely > powerful. I do wonder how many people try Eu, and just delete it after a few minutes. I know that I have certainly done that with other languages - yes, I try every one I can find on the web. If I can't figure out how to install or run the package, I just delete it. It isn't worth the effort to search for a mailing list and ask what is sure to be a series of dumb questions. If there is a book on the language, I'm more likely to give it a try, since that's a pretty good indication that at least one person actually got the stuff to run. Regards, Irv