[ZWeb] Guide for Corporate Decision Makers

[Donald Braman]

>This is a good one.
Hey! All my suggestions are good ones! ;-)

I agree wholeheartedly that zope.org should serve both potential and active
users. I think that most experienced zope users will be able to find what
they want because they are familiar with the site; new users will not have
such an easy time because the are unfamiliar. I think that, for this reason,
zope.org should be (more) sensitive to arrangments that might confuse new
visitors or lead them to walk away from the product.

Also, bear in mind that zope.org is the first place that people see when
they want to evaluate Zope. I mentioned Zope to colleagues (who I still need
to convince to use Zope for a project), and they were confused by the site
and not sure that it was even ready for real-world applications. I wasn't
sure myself, at first, but I spent a few days looking around the site and
then evaluating it. Most people don't have that long. Which is to say that
if you want to have a page that is dedicated mainly to active Zope users, it
should probably not be the first and primary page that potential users will
turn to. All of this is just to say that it is worth thinking through, from
soup to nuts, how a new potential user evaluating Zope and the site would
experience the site. It may turn out that it works for experienced users,
too (or can be easily adapted to that end). The reverse might not work so
well, though!

About "Case Studies" (or "why you should use zope"): I agree that it needs a
working up. The very first place many people considering Zope will look is
"case studies" to see if there is anything like what they do there. This is
a very important part of selling zope. As I noted above, my colleagues were
unsure that Zope was really all that good given the (relatively) weak
applications promoted by the site.

>Do you think the "Introducing Zope" link on the documentation page is
insufficient?
No, it is very good...it just needs to be linked to and given an clear title
(like "Introducing Zope," "About Zope," or "What Zope Is") on the front
page. Also (again) I don't think it is intuitive if you have a section on
your front page that says "Learn Zope" that doesn't link to documentation
and doesn't give some written guidance to the documentation itself.

About making the site more "newsie": I'd love to see more Zope News and Zope
in the News (assuming there is more news...it doesn't seem like there's more
than one or two items a day). About "About Zope.org": Actually, I think that
"About zope.org" could be smaller, and placed in the footer or on the
sidebar.

Thanks for doing all the hard work related to site management and listening
to gripers like me. It's a great site, I just want it to be a little bit
better for new & potential users. -Don