Promoting D projects (or internet marketing 101)

[Bill Baxter]

Tom wrote:

> Another thing I would improve (as a kind of marketing strategy) is the 
> aesthetics of digitalmars.com. It's very useful but very very very ugly 
> (sorry, just my honest opinion). I see it in almost every thing that has 
> a lot of success. 

Or maybe its that projects that have lots of success decide it's worth 
the effort to improve their websites.  I don't think you can say there's 
any causal relationship between the website and the success of the 
programming language.  Python's old site was pretty ugly and amateurish 
for a good long time -- until well after Python was a success.

Having nice images, with all kind of colors and stuff
> sells to the sight. 

Good web design != all kinds of colors and stuff :-)

People get attracted to lights and mirrors every
> time. I know that this isn't a trivial task, but it could certainly be 
> done.

I think the (newly redone) Python site is very professional looking:
www.python.org

Ruby's site looks good too:
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/

PHP is ok, but a little cluttered looking:
http://www.php.net/

Nemerle is a wiki, but it looks pretty nice:
http://nemerle.org/Main_Page

I think one thing is that (255,0,0) red just isn't a good color for a 
website, period.  It's seen in most of the images on the D site, eg:
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/overview.html.
It's hard on the eyes.  Low saturation colors are nicer to look at.

That said I like the curent D site.  A *touch* of color (preferably not 
more red) wouldn't hurt in softening the predominantly gray look.  But 
overall I think it looks fairly professional, except for MS-Paint style 
images here and there.

--bb