[fpc-devel] Systems fair

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Thu, 24 Nov 2005, schreef L505:

> 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.

So Pascal Server Pages should have a .pascal extension or something to 
the executables... Maybe :)

> 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.

There is not much wrong with our search engine rankings. We have a lot of 
external and internal links to our site, it does its job.

> 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?

http://gcc.gnu.org

I think our website is better by leaps and bounds than GCC's website. 
GCC's website is definately not the reason for its success.

> 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.

Yes. Every .c extension is marketing for the C language and the compiler 
to compile it is preinstalled on most systems :)

> 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.

We need to advertise better. The 2.0 marketing was done quite well IMHO, 
OSNews was a good choice, it gets 450000 hits a day, and with a story 
on-line it was easy to get sites like Slashdot interrested.

However, we cannot live from one big campaign once in five years. The 
problem is we are not as famous in the generic open source world as we are 
in the Delphi world for example. We need to get more known in the open 
source world and the majority of work that needs to be done here is 
outside freepascal.org.

Daniël