RE: [Zope] Front door on the Zope web site (Was Re: [Zope] SmartW orker)
-----Original Message----- From: Rik Hoekstra [mailto:fghoekstra@cit10.wsd.leidenuniv.nl] Sent: Thursday, October 28, 1999 00:25 To: Paul Everitt; zope@zope.org Subject: RE: [Zope] Front door on the Zope web site (Was Re: [Zope] SmartWorker)
Ironically if you did a survey of Zope users, most would
probably say
the same tale of woe. "I found out about Zope, downloaded it, worked like hell to understand it, then the light bulb turned on."
Quite so, but not exactly stimulating to start with is it?
o What questions should the Zope.org home page, and pages one click away, answer?
o What are some effective ways to answer those questions?
1. What can I do with Zope.
Present a quick tour, preferably in a slick slideshow. This should show of some of the 'what can I do with it' stuff, but present it from the more technical features point of view that make Zope outstanding. THe point with the technical features is that they are just busswords until you show what they mean (I know, a slideshow is still fake, but at least it gives an impression). And anyway a story told from a concept is more convincing.
Outline the highlights of the tour in a static presentation (for the impatient or those with slow connections)
2. Make it attractive and easy for people to get started: - Put downloading _prominently_ on the opening page.
- Prepare a 'beginners download'. This should include documentation, preferably a grounds up tutorial. Ideally this beginners download should come with an example database with a builtin interactive tutorial. The tutorial should be in Zope, and the described examples shoould be observable right away. This would be a Quickstart on steroids (an example is Macro Media Authorware that has a help system with examples and the examples can be adapted and included right away in your own product)
and make fixing the zope.org site a top priority. Going to the MS site and seeing how slow it is gives me no faith in ASP. Same applies here. The Zope site MUST run fast if people are to trust in it no matter what the technical reason for its extremely slugish performance may be. I've given up looking at it (>1min is my limit).
"Jay, Dylan" wrote:
and make fixing the zope.org site a top priority. Going to the MS site and seeing how slow it is gives me no faith in ASP. Same applies here. The Zope site MUST run fast if people are to trust in it no matter what the technical reason for its extremely slugish performance may be. I've given up looking at it (>1min is my limit).
Believe me, it couldn't be a higher priority. We ordered a new machine for on Friday and the stupid computer company sent it 3 day instead of next day. Sigh. It should be in today. Zope.org will then run by itself on a modestly powered machine. Some notes on this. Zope.org is sharing a PII-350, 256Mb machine with a lot of other services, namely these mailing lists. We'll also use it as an opportunity to move to mod_fastcgi, switch to not doing reverse DNS lookups in Apache, and another of other "transition" improvements. In the interests of getting things under control, putting it on its own box will be an imminently sane thing to do. Still, we do need to keep an eye on making the software perform better. I'm very very interested in the cache information reported earlier. We'll tinker with that today on a test site. --Paul
participants (2)
-
Jay, Dylan -
Paul Everitt