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Comment by jfaucett | Hacker News Reader

First I'd like to say I love the idea since I'm a huge FOSS guy. Also I think there is and will become an ever increasing demand for this niche. I'm assumng this is a show HN (could be wrong), so if its critiques you'd like I'd say the #1 problem is the design and visual layout, the generic bootstrap is nice for quickly throwing ideas together but for an actual project where you want traction for me its kind of too unprofessional looking. Otherwise, great job though, I think from an idea and functionality perspective this is awesome, and I would be interested in helping out if you would like it :)

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> generic bootstrap is nice for quickly throwing ideas together but for an actual project where you want traction for me its kind of too unprofessional looking.

Unprofessional because it doesn't have a unique design? Cause its clean, well put together, and has better usability than 90% of the other sites out there. How is that unprofessional???

yes, because it doesn't have a unique design. It signals a lack of time spent and attention to detail. Not that I don't like the idea.

It's a volunteer project all driven by myself. You are right, I did not spend too much time on it - even the source code is mostly not mine. But I think it serves its purpose, and it was more important for me to actually have a platform for FOSS jobs than spend hours coding one.

all good and valid points. As I said this is just my opinion, but I think having a unique design is important for distinguishing yourself from the crowd and does help boost the user base, it doesn't have to be beautifull, and of course it depends on the context and your goals. Maybe in this case, it doesn't matter at all if the design is the same as many other sites. Also though, unprofessional was maybe the wrong word, I guess more apt would be "project looking" or something related because I'm so accustomed to seeing github projects that use bootstrap to have a project page in no time.

Meh. This site looks better than 99.9% of sites on the web. Craigslist looks like garbage, yet that is where most people post jobs now. Something tells me design isn't really make or break here, as long as it's usable

Craigslist is often called out as an form of "worse is better" in that having a crappy, 90s site design helps to keep regular Joes from being too intimidated to participate. It's OK to post your boring, crappy whatever because nothing there is "impressive" and everyone's having a fine time.

I'm one of the targets for this site, and I think it looks just fine. Works without JS, offers RSS feeds to drop into rss2email. It's pretty nice for the first version, IMO.

> for me its kind of too unprofessional looking

For me, I don't care. I want to be able to see the info easily and I want the pages to load / render quickly. I suspect this is a common sentiment among the site's target audience.

Sure, I can use all help I can get! The source is on Github, feel free to improve it. Or, if you don't like it at all (it's PHP, and not the cleanest code), drop it and write a replacement.

Contact me via email and we can chat about it. You can also find me as "gamambel" on IRC, eg. irc.oftc.net in #tor.

This goes for anyone reading these lines :)

> for me its kind of too unprofessional looking

That's the case with most open source projects, unfortunately, unless they are led by a big company.

design kvetching always strikes me as shallow. Just because something looks like others, it's not a problem.

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