More design love please...
This is a follow up, or rather extension to xSawyerxs Marketing the Entire Box (including the wrapper)
I completely agree, design is the first thing people notice about a project. If you do not put effort into the look of your projects web page then whether you like it or not it will have an affect on the perception of your project (and indirectly on Perl).
If someone (my list of projects is way too large at the moment unfortunately) has time I think there are two projects which would make a massive difference.
- Provide a Creative Commons licensed design(s) that anyone can use for a Perl project. Lots of us are not designers, so even if we'd like to make our projects look better we don't know how!
- See if it is possible to get CPAN redesigned, this is already the home to thousands of Perl projects, so improving this will have a massive impact.
Many of the Apple applications websites have a similar feeling (simple and clean), this is because they all use iWeb. Good design does not mean lots of design. It just means a clean page, and separating content under headings (rather than having a single page with everything just listed).
London Perl developer
I completely agree. These are my thoughts exactly on what should be done. We need to upgrade the look & feel (tm?) of CPAN as well as work on more means of providing a beautiful persona of our projects.
My comment here[1] tries to reflect it, but I think you've put it in better terms. :)
[1] https://blogs.perl.org/users/sawyer_x/2010/02/marketing-the-entire-box-including-the-wrapper.html#comment-330
I think the community at large has for the most part come to a consensus on this. But I would point out that at the very least "CPAN" (by which I presume you probably mean search.cpan.org) actually looks pretty good. I'd argue that it's interface is worlds better than most autodoc generated html.