On Thu, 14 Dec 2000, Stas Bekman wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Dec 2000, Gunther Birznieks wrote:
>
> > >You can use my hackish Pod::HtmlPsPdf, which tries hard to help generate
> > >slides. The only caveat it has now, is that the html2ps tool that it uses
> > >generates not 100% complete PS, so when I run ps2pdf everything is cool,
> > >but acroread has no option to rotate slides by 90% , so I have to use
> > >ghostview instead during my classes.
> >
> > Well, the thing is that a real slide format like PPT is a bit more
> > professional looking than PS/PDF as a format for slides. I'm not saying
> > your slides aren't professional looking, but PS/PDF generated slides seem a
> > bit plain.
>
> It doesn't look professional at all, so what? Aren't we talking about
> creating a set of tutorials for mongers and user groups? What's important
> is the information, not how fancy the background picture is.
Thats where I think you're wrong. People care a *lot* about how things
look. Case in point with AxKit - I had an old site up at
xml.sergeant.org/axkit (I think its still there, I don't check). I didn't
get much interest, maybe 20 page views a day or so. When (again with
Robin's excellent designer help) I bit the bullet and redesigned at
axkit.org the number of hits rose dramatically the very day I released the
new design. And it wasn't just because of the domain name because AxKit
wasn't a well known name at the time. It was because it looked good (or at
least better - I'm still not happy with all that purple :-)
The point being - we all despise marketing tactics of producing flashy web
sites with pretty pictures because we're geeks. But it works - it draws
people in. And provided you actually give them some good content to read
once you've drawn them in I don't see too many negative points about it.
(and if I'm honest, I've always shuddered a bit seeing you use gv for your
slideshows - its just not a good slideshow application. Sorry Stas :-)
--
<Matt/>
/|| ** Director and CTO **
//|| ** AxKit.com Ltd ** ** XML Application Serving **
// || ** http://axkit.org ** ** XSLT, XPathScript, XSP **
// \\| // ** Personal Web Site: http://sergeant.org/ **
\\//
//\\
// \\
