On Fri, 2007-06-01 at 09:57 +0100, James Gardner wrote: > Ben and I have started thinking again about what really makes Pylons > different from other web frameworks and how we can best highlight those > differences in the Pylons marketing to help attract people to the > community and see Pylons gain further recognition and adoption.
I'd just like to pipe up with my two cents. 1) I like the current logo, especially as it's used in the "powered by" image. 2) As far as the project name goes, Pylons may not be wonderful, but it's certainly no worse than "TurboGears" or "Ruby on Rails". 3) As far as the URL, pylonshq.org isn't wonderful, but at least it's short, and frankly I doubt it matters. People don't type URLs, they click links. No one cares. I would be tempted to get all of pylonshq.com/org and pylons-hq.com/org just to help people who do typo them in and aren't 100% certain of the spelling. Overall, I think the key thing to remember here is that the target audience is developers and I don't think these are going to be the primary concerns for a developer visiting the site for the first time. Here's a few things I *do* think are important: 1) Overall finish. I know this is part of what this thread is about, but I think focusing too much on the details (logo, URL, etc) and ignoring the larger picture is a mistake. The site needs to look polished and that involves a bigger vision. I'd prioritize it roughly as: organization, color schemes, logo. The biggest problem with the current site revolves around the first two items. Honestly the color scheme isn't bad (mochikit.com uses similar colors to good effect), but it needs better organization to make it appear more friendly to first-time visitors (the three-box navigation mochikit and 1000 other sites present may be a bit overused, but frankly that's because it's so effective). 2) Fast information. RoR (and then TG) showed the power of the screencast. People want a quick overview of how things are done in a framework. Screencasts turned out to be excellent for this purpose. 3) Completeness. Right now there are out-of-date examples, off-site links related to core features, examples that openly question whether they are doing it right, etc. Documentation is important and new visitors are going to at least peruse it to see if it looks adequate to stake their projects on. Even if we can't have complete docs, we need to at least fix what's there. 4) References. Know of a large/cool/hip site that uses Pylons? Get it on the front page. A big concern for developers is whether or not a framework can handle their site without tons of hardware and hair-pulling (although somehow RoR seems to transcend that requirement). Django at least gets 3 and 4 dead on, and this is arguably the root of much of that project's success. RoR gets 1,2 and 4 right (even if 4 is badly misleading). TG gets 1 mostly right, 2 mostly right, fakes 3 and is catching up on 4. Pylons doesn't get any right, but at least fakes 3 almost as good as TG. I'm not complaining about the current state (well, aside from docs), but if there's going to be a big push to address Pylon's marketing, I think these are far more important than a logo. Cliff --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pylons-discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to pylons-discuss@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pylons-discuss?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
