[ZWeb] Re: [Zope] Come kick some tires, at new.zope.org

[Joachim Werner]

Hi!

> Which is why we should be sending those people to zope.com (the
salesmanship
> site) or to a beauty contest site.  Zope.org is a Developer site.  I would
> not disagree at all that there ought to be beauty sites; including zope
> oriented beauty sites.  (Which is why I proposed a "Am I Hot" series of
> links.)

> I certainly think it appropriate that zope.org have a disclaimer at the
> bottom of the page stating that: "This site is oriented towards making the
> experience as speedy and useful as possible for developers and daily
users.
> To that end, it has a deliberatly stripped-down design.  Our shameless
> commerce division is at http://www.zope.com.  ____ and ____ are some
> examples of designer oriented zope sites."

This is the first time I hear the statement "Zope.org is a developer site".
dev.zope.org is, for sure. But zope.org has always been THE zope site for
everybody from suits seeking for Zope basic information (e.g. the case
studies) to the more technically oriented. And even technically oriented
people will appreciate good design. It's not only VISUAL design I am talking
about, but also the design of the navigation (i.e. the information
architecture), so that it becomes as easy as possible to find stuff.

As somebody has pointed out, the design draft for EuroZope.org is no more
than 30 KB in size, that's roughly the same as zope.org's front page has
now. You can also use even less graphics, like in the nice examples of
metazope and zopezen (if you don't count the icons there).

With most people having rather fast connections and graphics being cached by
the browser anyway, I can't accept having a simple site layout to be the
most important design goal of a site of the importance of zope.org. BTW: If
you want it fast and plain, use w3m or lynx, and all the graphics are gone
(I guess you could still switch graphics off in IE, too)...

Another point to make here: Redirecting the non-developers to zope.com is
certainly no solution for ALL problems. To some extent, we (the other Zope
services providers) compete with Zope Corporation or at least add services
Zope Corp. does not offer. And while we all accept that Zope Corp. should
get the main credits for Zope, we wouldn't want Zope to be identified with
Zope Corporation ONLY. I think I am totally in synch with Zope Corp. here.
They just cannot (right now) provide the full range of Zope-related
services. Some of the other Zope businesses add Zope hosting to the
portfolio, others offer services in Europe, Asia, South America, or
Australia , where Zope Corporation is not locally available. So if we talk
about Zope as a whole, there's no doubt that zope.org is the site.

Last not least: As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago on ZopeZen or
ZopeNewbies (I don't remember), the thing we should be heading at is a
family of cross-syndicated Zope sites, so that everybody can choose their
favourite editor and site design (so sombody could do a "no-graphics" Zope
site, let's call it "ZLynx" or so), but the basic information (news,
documentation, ...) is shared between the sites. This would be an even
better showcase for Zope than just one zope.org site.

Cheers

Joachim