[fpc-devel] Systems fair

[L505]

> >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.