A couple of posts talked specifically about “design”. To me that means fancy graphics and lots of attention paid to color schemes and stuff. I don’t know that I necessarily care about that. I mostly just care about getting at the information I want and having that information be easily consumed. I guess you could argue that good design helps there, but I’ve seen sites that are almost nothing but plain HTML that do the job. In fact, I seem to remember the Apache site being mostly HTML for a long time.

As for PHP-Nuke, I would agree that from the perspective of someone who has never heard of the app before, going to that site would not do a lot to encourage me. However, that app is downloaded at least hundreds, if not thousands of times per day. Presumably a lot of that is due to word of mouth, so people just go and download it sight unseen. This has the unfortunate effect of making the site designers think they’re doing a super-fantastic job. Also, if you study that site for about a minute, you’ll see that they actually do have some of the information there, but it’s all out of order. In addition, I’ll also agree that PHP-Nuke should really just be called something like “article publishing website in a box”, because last I saw, it was not a CMS. There are a bunch of PHP applications that call themselves “Content Management Systems” because that’s what PHP/MySQL book authors in 2000-2001 called the little mini-project example, which built something not dissimilar to slashdot. In fact, the guy who started PHP-Nuke did so as a way to learn PHP. I don’t know if he knew what a CMS was either at that time.

@ernst doubt – I’d reply to that classic “stop whining” post except that I’ve learned that I could write the most beautiful response, and at best it would just be whipped cream on top of a pile of steaming crap. Let’s not feed the trolls. I only approved the comment to see if there was any other hidden sentiment like it out there. Turns out there isn’t.

@ everyone else, thanks a lot for the encouraging words. Glad you found my ramblings useful

You’ll attract better developers with a better site because it saves them time and because a good developer will want to be associated with a quality project.

I just set up my Jambu web site jambu.fullmeasure.co.uk trying to make it as informative as possible and found I just needed a little tweak with ideas from your list.

@ernst doubt: even if you disagree with his specific points, you have to agree with the spirit of making project websites easy to use. You say that projects need more developers, not users, but I would think that many people would be users of a project before becoming a developer on it.