Hi k3n, I would love your feedback on a project of mine. It's not a FOSS project, but is related to them. You'll see more about it in my profile. If you're willing to help me out a little, please contact me (my email address is in my profile).
Hi! I'll preface this by letting you know that I'm not a marketing professional -- I'm in development, and so my POV is going to be more technically-oriented, but I did give your site a glance and it's very approachable by my standards:
* a simple, non-distracting design
* text is easy to read and there's no feel of keyword stuffing or buzzword bingo
* you define the problem and offer product differentiation both in the first 2 sentences (can't get much better than that IMO)
* you have both an "about" and a FAQ
* terms are easy to find
The main thing I'm seeing that you're missing are more of what the OP talks about, in the sense that the 'call to action' seems weak. There's the "for developers" part, though nothing for the "for users". If I understand correctly, perhaps you could link to /browse for the users? Or conversely, if the "for developers" is the meat & bones and there really isn't too much for users, I might suggest making the "for devs" a little more prominent and the "for users" a little less prominent -- such as placing devs above users or something... not sure, but it does seem that your site has a strong opening and good content, but is lacking somewhat in guiding users what to do next. For instance, I'll keep it in mind incase a need for something like this ever makes itself apparent, though if it a list of projects involved and recognized one I use, I might dig in further to see if I wanted to pledge (I do realize this could be the chicken & egg problem if it's a new site).
Thanks very much! I was going for a clean, simple design, so I'm glad that came through. I agree, the calls to action need work.
Users will normally enter the site through a link given them by a developer, that will take them to one of the developer's proposals; that's where their call to action should be, I think. (There is one, but it needs to be more prominent and a little easier to use.)
But I have a more fundamental problem: I have yet to find any developers who actually want to use this thing. I mean, any at all. Admittedly, I haven't been looking much yet outside my own circles, which are fairly small. But it seems at first glance that there aren't that many OSS developers who are even interested in being paid for their work. It appears that a fairly focused search is going to be necessary to find the ones who are.
So what I wanted to ask you is this: in your reviews of OSS projects, what fraction would you say evince a reasonable degree of marketing savvy? Would you be comfortable sharing any names of those who do? My thinking here is that those who actually think about their project as a product, to some extent, are likelier candidates to be interested in my site.
Any general observations you might have about OSS developer psychology would also be of interest.
