New Python.org website ?

[Tim Parkin]

Leeuw van der, Tim wrote:

>I think that in general, I don't like the fact that links to
>high-profile users are featured so prominently. That row of pictures
>there looks good to me 'as such' but linking there to 'success stories'
>feels, dunno, perhaps a bit cheesy to me. (That might be just my dutch
>upbringing)
>I would certainly want to see such links somewhere on the front page,
>just not so prominently.
>  
>
Possibly so... however in my experience, selling python to people is
made a lot easier by being able to say 'look these guys are using it'.
This may not help sell it to programmers, but as a businessman trying to
sell my programming services, it's exceptionally important.

>>
>>btw do you have a problem with using nasa or astrazeneca as example
>>    
>>
>high
>  
>
>>profile users?
>>    
>>
>
>As I said, I don't like them. We're not a commercial company trying to
>promote itself to potential buyers. But that's too a large degree a
>matter of taste.
>  
>
Well I'd have to disagree with yout on one point.. 'We' may not
be a commercial company (when you talk about python as a singular unit)
but as python developers, we should be in the process of trying to
'sell' python wherever we can. Because we aren't a commercial company,
our only 'sales' channels are the website and the developers/consultants
that use python. (I'm talking about selling in the terms of 'promoting'
or trying to persuade someone that using python is a good thing).

>I do actually think, though, that if the Python website *is* going to
>feature such big names with such prominence, some sort of approval from
>these organizations should be requested? That they don't mind being used
>a a Python reference story?
>  
>
The approval is already there (see pythonology success stories).

>About what could be there... Link to the even calender, or
>recent/upcoming event.. That is one to stay, I think.
>I think it would be good to have a link there too development
>environments that can be used for Python: editors, debuggers, IDEs / IDE
>extenstions, etc
>
>  
>
It's difficult to summarise this in a single image. The XP image was
intended as a 'catch all' for the development environment. A different
image and title would probably achieve better results but coming up with
one or two words to sumarise that list is quite difficult.

>A third item could perhaps be a link to the Python Package Index --
>another thing that Python developers are likely to need.
>
>  
>
The home page isn't intended to target existing python users.. and the
home page photos are mostly targetted at the sort of people that respond
well to photos. It's a dilemma that the home page has to serve two
masters, however if we have a 'developer home page' which can be
dedicated to development issues, news, planetpython links, package
libraries etc, we would have a single page that developers could bookmark.

The only alternative was to create a separate 'marketing python' website
but it would just get ignored, especially by the people we really need
to see the 'marketing' content.

>These things are, of course, rather developer-centered (well,
>Python-user centered...)
>Being a software developer that uses Python, I wouldn't really know what
>else to put there ;-)
>But many people might have other things they wish to put in the centre
>of atte
>
Yep,

Thats probably why a dedicated page for developers would make more sense.

Tim

p.s. thanks for the comments btw..