> >I think like how torry.net, Delphi 3000, etc. work (but you obviously can > >create > >smaller websites than that) people should be building independent websites to promote > >freepascal. > > > > > > > I would diagree. Up to now there a tons of sites concering FPC/Lazarus: > freepascal.org, sourceforge, stack.nl, wiki, ftp-sites, mirrors, cvs, etc.
Mirrors and cvs are not at all like what I was talking about. > That produces much confusion. Of course, mirrors and cvs do cause confusion. And all the clone documentation sites out there do too. That's not what I was talking about. In order to see PHP in use, people build sites with PHP and put a PHP logo on it. PHP isn't successful because of the PHP.net website! > "One face to the customer". I'm talking about genuine, unique, freepascal user websites. Look how many PHP or Visual Basic sites there are, with "I'm a happy PHP user" written all over them. The extension myfile.php is marketing itself. If your websites had a myfile.pp or mysite.fp extension, that would be marketing via brand naming. The PHP extension on files itself is branding. Every time you see a PHP extension on a file, you are getting brainwashed with the word "php". That's marketing. Okay, I come from an internet marketing background. If you have one single domain name, your search engine rankings and traffic are pretty poor. If you have 5000 websites promoting freepascal, your search engine rankings and traffic improve greatly. It's similar to having 5000 ads in the paper versus one nice ad. And mirrors bring your search engine ranking down. If you have 100 mirrors, your search engine rankings and traffic do not improve greatly. Mirrors can cause google to see your website as clones, and this sometimes brings the ranking down. That's not really a big issue right now with the FPC website, since the mirrors don't seem to be affecting it's ranking. I don't think the GNU C compiler website looks all that good? In fact I don't even know if there is a GNU C compiler main website or homepage!? I probably wouldn't ever visit it, since there are so many other ways to download the GNU C compiler. I'm more interested in the people who USE and have had real world experience with the compiler, right? I don't think the GNU C compiler is popular because of one nice website. I think the reason GNU C compiler is successful is because of all the fan boys, their applications (gzip, midnight commander, linux, and 50,000 other applications made in C), and their websites, and of course directories like debian.org which link to several C applications. So in summary: one nice website is nice, but from a realistic internet marketing perspective, more importantly are huge databases of content, examples, and program/unit directories from the users. FPC documentation already exists well on the search engines, but examples of the applications or websites that are run off FPC engines or FPC code, do not exist. Don't get me wrong: one nice website, is not harmful in any way. It's not going to harm anyone. I just seek a realistic marketing perspective, where thousands of people are downloading software from word of mouth and real world examples, rather than a nice looking website. _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - [email protected] http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
