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| From: | John Roper |
| Subject: | Re: New LilyPond website |
| Date: | Tue, 29 Nov 2016 20:07:31 -0500 |
> On Nov 29, 2016, at 3:57 AM, Andrew Bernard <address@hidden> wrote:
> If however you are discussing expanding the mindshare of lilypond in the
> music publishing world, then I hardly think the cosmetic appearance of a
> website is the most influential factor. That's a very shallow approach.
> Surely it must be the quality and engineering of the software itself that
> speaks for lilypond's virtues.
The cosmetic appearance of the web site is most certainly an influential factor in expanding the "mindshare" of Lilypond. That is one of the realities of the world as it works. The quality and engineering of the software itself is invisible to 99% of your potential users.
Take me- I am a musician. I know nothing useful about C and it's variants, Scheme, etc. Lilypond might have the most elegant code ever written and I will not see it, even if you point right at it. The result? I am not going to evaluate Lilypond by its engineering. There's clearly some disadvantage to me for that, but at 57 years old with a full-time career, I'm not going to learn how to code. But the advantage is that I get to look at the software and the website more naively- compared to someone who has an encyclopedic knowledge of what's under the hood- as a new potential user would.
Unless you only want people who already know how to code to be your customers. That's a small market.
For people just finding out about Lilypond, the Lilypond web site is the point of entry (I first heard about Lilypond on the MacUpdate site and followed the link from there). Does it say to me "this is a modern, powerful application that will produce beautiful sheet music that you will be proud to hand out to your peers?" Or does it say "this application is the product of spit, chewing gum and baling wire?" OK, I am exaggerating a lot because the current web site doesn't actually say that to me, but it is dated now and looks a bit hobbyist by comparison.
Inasmuch as much of the FOSS community is often loathe to admit it, branding does actually matter. Getting people to use the software matters. Writing great free-as-in-speech software and then not persuading people to give it a try tends to shoot that software in the foot. An attractive, modern website can help with that.
John's pages look pretty good and I thank him for the hours he put into it. The scrolling is not annoying on my tablets but was on my laptops, for some reason. That being said, having looked at the sample web site on my laptops, tablets and phone, the Learn page is very difficult as it stands. It's row upon row of basically undifferentiated choices- if you didn't go there already knowing what you wanted, the page doesn't help you choose.
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