As awesome as these look, am I the only one who thinks that the word "beautiful" (along with "rich") has gotten overused in web design? It's become a buzzword, I think, to the point that perfectly good synonyms or even more descriptive phrases simply don't get used.
That's not to knock the substance of the post, much less the work, but perhaps it's just a bit of a pet peeve. Carry on. :)
Ah, the involuntary irony of saying "beautiful" is overused while calling these designs "awesome". The word you're looking for is "good". You're not awestruck by these designs, you just think they're good.
So true. I almost never remember any of the things I do on the web, but when I do, I remember them as "checking my email" or "logging into facebook," not "having a rich user interaction on a beautifully designed web experience."
I would be ok with that. I would say I'd be willing to pay up to $20. Larger projects may even have of more of a need, but then again they may or may not have the design talent who can contribute.
I believe a well designed presence goes a long way in aiding the adoption of a project.
Indeed, I read on TheVerge.com (I think?) some time ago about a guy who's completely self-sufficient and made upwards of $20k just selling themes on ThemeForrest for $10/download
Look up Orman Clark from PremiumPixels.com. He's sold well over a million dollars on ThemeForest. Unfortunately, the marketplace is now filled with a lot of get rich quick schemers. I know they're (Envato) trying to work on cleaning up the community, but it's going to be a challenge as the market grows. If you want to be successful on ThemeForest in the long-term, I suggest building your own brand to co-exist with the marketplace. Orman serves as a good example of creating a brand differentiated from others. His sense of design is incredible and his success is well deserved.
My stumbling block with ghpages is the workflow. I have not found a good way to work with the project in the master branch and then my docs/web-content in the ghpages branch. A lot of time all I really need to do is take something from my master/working branch and transmogrify it and dump the output to ghpages. Maybe its something about my git-fu? Or maybe most people's ghpages is less dependent/tied-to what is in their master branch.
Now just treat them as distinct "repos" and push independently. The basic idea here is that you're breaking up "clone" (which by default pulls everything) into its composite steps.
In a project I have where I generated pages based of code in my master I would have two folders that both were the same repo, one just stayed as master and the other as gh-pages. Meaning I could automate moving things and then pushing from that directory.
I find the gh_pages branch confusing too -- the idea that a branch doesn't contain something related to the other branches feels weird.
What I've found is it's easier to create a free organization, and that way you can get a organization.github.com project created and host the pages there.... this is easier than juggling the spare branch. Obviously smaller starter projects should not do this, but you could use username.github.com/yourproject name and not keep the documentation on the branch just as easily.
Presto, no gh_pages branch, but all of the advantages of hosting web content.
That's how I do it, it works great that way. I didn't actually set up the gh-pages as a proper submodule, I just cloned the branch to a folder. Then I added the gh-pages folder to the top level .gitignore.
This looks very nice, but unfortunately I cannot use it because each gh-page corresponds to a specific repo, whereas my project is comprised of several repos and I want one website to document all of these repos at once.
Would anybody have any other suggestions for getting a simple homepage for a software project up and running reasonably quickly, without having to fiddle with CSS or JavaScript too much? Something like what GH Pages is trying to do, but maybe a little more flexible. Is something like WP the way to go?
That's not to knock the substance of the post, much less the work, but perhaps it's just a bit of a pet peeve. Carry on. :)