An aesthetically nice website is a neutral or a negative signal when it comes to technical subjects, like computer languages. Content first, graphical design is completely secondary.
Just need to represent information about the technical subject clearly.
If the technical merits are there, adopters will come. Technical people are not baffled by $animal . $excrement. Instead, it puts them off.
Edit: I get downvoted a lot, but could someone prove me wrong? What technical concepts (like programming languages) got popular with help of nice graphical design?
That kind of thinking will only prevent adoption, not help it.
Aesthetics are important to technical subjects as well. It shows that a lot of time and consideration have gone into every part of the project, not just the technical side. It's also a good sign of community support/interaction. I will agree that content is the most important, but you shouldn't write off aesthetics so easily, especially when you want people to be interested and adopt your technology.
Try to google some popular languages. Use http://archive.org/ to see how their respective pages looked like in the past. I find it hard to believe aesthetics helped their adoption.
Interesting article, related to web design and conversion rate:
Popularity being based on the Rails 2.0 release since that's when Ruby/Rails seemingly started to take off. It's a bit before my time so if anyone knows better feel free to correct me.
It looked pretty good when I saw it for the first time today. Told me what it is about concisely. I don't see how a better design could significantly improve Nim's adoption.
Edit: I did completely miss the carousel at top of the Nim main page. I think it'd work better, if it was just serially on the page instead of the widget. Same content, less "design".
You're missing the entire point. If they had a better design it would probably interest people more, pertinent information would be more visible, and it wouldn't look like it came out of 2002.
This is pretty much the "sales" page for Nim and it looks outdated and unmaintained. For comparison check out the Rust homepage. It's not "flashy" but it's simple and looks fairly nice. It gives you a simple example and tells you why you should be using Rust in as few words as possible.
All of those languages/tools show that the community/devs care about how they and their language look to others/potential adopters. I'm not saying that having a great site design (not graphical design, that's different) are going to make Nim the most popular language on the planet. I'm suggesting that it can, and will help if they move forward and pick up a more modern design and simplify the content to get their point across.
