Jim Washington wrote:
Amos,
Good show so far. I agree with other respondents that a bit of 'flash' might promote a more professional image.
I think in addition that some way of seeing more of what people are doing with Zope would be helpful. Make it more personal and less 'faceless.'
One way to do this would be to put additional optional hooks into member information:
* photo * occupation * links to, or screenshots of, zope-based websites the member has put up, with type of site (commercial, corporate, educational, personal, porn??? etc...)
Perhaps, if enough members have this information available, the front page could feature a "Zopista profile" (in the manner of "Dewars profile") of a random or periodically selected member?
Just brainstorming... But I usually wonder, when I see a site promoting a product, "What kind of weirdoes use the product, and for what?" "Am I that kind of weirdo?" "Do I have to be a rocket scientist to get going with it?"
-- Jim Washington
Amos Latteier wrote:
Hi,
There's been a fair amount of discussion on the Zope lists about redoing the opening pages on Zope.org to better communicate what Zope is and what it can do for you. It's clear that many people have had difficulty feeling like they knew what Zope was and of what value it might be to them.
We'd like to learn from you about how to do a better job communicating about Zope.
I've prepared a mockup of a new Zope.org front door based on feedback from the lists.
http://www.zope.org/Members/Amos/FrontDoor/
This mockup includes a number of new pages including a Zope tour and a new summary of the Zope architecture based on Evan Simpson's post. I'm eager to get this up on Zope.org, but first I want to make sure that we're on the right track.
I'd like to bring up a slightly offtopic subject: Navigation. I think that it is unnecessarily confusing to have the top level links innthe left column replaced when you down one level. I realize that those top level links are duplicated at the top of the page, but that only makes it worse. ie. "I click on 'documentation'... don't see what I want, and want to click on that 'products' link I saw there a moment ago... where is it? Oh, fine, I'll click back..." See what I mean? It's confusing and annoying. While having both global and local navigation is acceptable, simply replacing the global navigation with the local navigation is not. A better solution would be to indent the local navigation under the appropriate section of the global navigation, which would preserve context (ie. "Where am I?"). In fact, if you want to show off Zope's 'coolness' factor, you could replace it with a tree tag, and allow logged in users to preserve tree-state across pages. HTH, Michael.