Top 6 wishlist items for developer websites
Posted: Tue Jun 09, 2020 6:49 pm
Sometime back I published an overview of suggestions for freeware developers, but I decided to approach it again, this time distilling it down to the top six issues I have with dev websites, ordered by my own preference and frequency of appearance. To be clear, I appreciate that a lot of devs are doing this for free and we're here to help promote good software, but these can all help us separate the gold from the stones.
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Feedback welcome. Here's the other thread more suggestions.
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Related: Open letter to security developers
- Screenshots that are clear and detailed - this doesn't have to be every single screen that your program can display, but a picture really is worth a thousand words. This should always be one of the first three things on your home page.
- - Changelog - that's clear and obvious and contains dates. This the easiest way to tell your visitors this is an actively developed program that does more than update the skins every 6 months. As a freeware maintainer, this is maybe my most common frustration.
- - Short video introduction - Helps avoid making your users dig for the point of your efforts. Over 2 minutes but no more than 5, with the highlights like the problem it solves, who might be interested.
- - Mirrors - Demonstrates your program's availability. Softpedia has been a reliable host over the years.
- - Requirements / Expertise necessary - If the program you're working on is really targeted at developers, put that up top. If it only runs on Windows 10 with the latest dotNET version, requires a gig of space, and you need to download FFMPEG, list that too. I've looked at a dozen programs in the past month alone that had me digging for 10 minutes only to find out it requires (for example) Python expertise and only runs on Android.
- - A clear license - important bits for us are whether it can be used in a professional environment and if you can redistribute the binary (we mirror a lot of old programs to keep them alive).
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Feedback welcome. Here's the other thread more suggestions.
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Related: Open letter to security developers