Re: new website draft 8: almost giving up

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 10:02:51PM -0700, Mark Polesky wrote:
> Graham Percival wrote:
> > But this should only happen after we have the new site done and
> > ideally translated into one or two languages.  So let's get back
> > to work and leave this bikeshed behind.
> 
> Why wait? The value of links that point to the current lilypond.org
> will not drop when we change the look of the homepage. If you have
> a website, go ahead and link to lilypond... there's no need to wait.
> Especially if you have a high-ranking website (although off-hand, I
> don't know of any among the developer lot).

I was talking about approaching sites like free sheet music stuff,
linux audio stuff, etc.  Sites for which our users are *not* the
webmasters.  In those cases, we need to appeal to a non-user...
potentially even non-musician... to take the trouble to correct
their description of lilypond.  That's much easier done when the
website is more impressive.

And even if some of our users *are* the webmasters, it doesn't
make sense for them to add a big annoucement about lilypond at
thie moment, does it?


Besides, asking our users to advertize our site will *also* be
easier when we have a new site.  I mean, it gives a good excuse to
motivate people, right?

(oh, I just noticed this is on -user rather than -devel.  Oh well)

> I think we could boost our rank significantly by having the exact
> phrase "free music notation software" in our description field.

The meta description field, or the "what is lilypond" box?  If
you're talking about the "what is lilypond" box, then please
supply the exact new text you're proposing.  I'm completely fed up
with crafting and re-crafting those two (or more) sentences.

> Neither of the other two could legally get away with that. And if
> you guys are willing, I think we could achieve the crowning blow
> by putting that exact phrase also in the <title> field:
> 
> <TITLE>LilyPond, free music notation software</TITLE>

I think it makes more sense to put our motto in there.  Now, I'm
not arguing that we shouldn't change the motto.

> Maybe it lacks the poetic qualities of "...for everyone", but it's
> worth discussing if you're going for SEO.

I'm not convinced it's worth going for SEO, but if you want to
re-open the motto debate, that's fine.

> And Graham, I think the endless multitudes of us "free"-wheeling
> googlers vastly outnumber the representatives of refined civility
> in Canada and Singapore. Combined. :) Take it as a compliment.

I'm happy to accept a compliment, but I don't understand the
comment.  If you're suggesting that the general public understands
"free", then I disagree.  If you're suggesting that the
"free-aware" fraction of the population outnumbers the
"non-free-aware" fraction of the population, then I also disagree.
Now, you could certainly argue that anybody who isn't aware of
Linux/firefox/free software by now won't like lilypond... but we
probably have a few users (coming from the Windows world) who
would disagree.

In any case, I can't believe that "Why do developers work on free
software", in a special box of its own, would make the website
harder to navigate.

Cheers,
- Graham