Thursday, February 10, 2005 - Thu, 10 Feb 2005

Making up a Readme file is a bit trickier than making up a license file. Search your computer for files with “read” in its name, and you’ll find a huge assortment. There are text files, rich text files, html files, Windows Help files, Adobe Acrobat files, Microsoft Word files and even executable programs. They have names like Readme, ReadMe, Read_Me, read.me, ReadThisFirst and a host of others. What they contain is equally divergent. I found an interesting article on what to put into a Readme file and it gives a lot of good tips, but may be asking for just a bit too much.

One thing it does ask for is an “elevator statement” that describes the program in one or two lines (about the time you have in an elevator to tell someone what your program does). This is something I haven’t pinned down yet. I’ll have to finalize that plus an additional descriptive paragraph about Behold that will describe its essence. Maybe I’ll use the statement that I currently have to start off Behold’s home page: “Behold is a genealogy program developed not so much to help you get your data in, but to really help you get your data out!”

I don’t like the way I modified Behold’s home page a few days ago. The “What will Behold do for you?” section is pretty lame. If I want Behold to be successful, then I do have to market it properly. I liked what I had a couple of years ago which was quite an active introduction. I put that back in and updated it and now I’m happy again. Check it out. I also moved my features list to its own features page.