Beautiful is better than ugly

[Anthony Fisher]

L?on Brocard <acme at astray.com> wrote:

> Alias ranted: http://use.perl.org/~Alias/journal/38842
> 
> Which Perl website do you think looks the worst? Which has the worst navigation?
> 
> We managed to redesign london.pm.org. Is it time to do another?

Some aspects of good/bad design are fairly universal, but I think it's
worth asking "what are we trying to achieve" here. Who is the audience
and what is our message?

Also, since we're playing catch-up on this front, there really isn't
any harm in derivative design.

Brain-drizzle:

We have two main audiences: corporate types and geeks. It might be
helpful to aim particular sites primarily at one or the other. Eg
perl.com/org at corporates, CPAN and .pm sites at techies.

To corporate types we want to say:

    Perl is alive (Brian Blessed voice optional)
    Perl is suitable for major/"enterprise" applications
    Lots of other people use Perl, and it's widely supported
    No, really, it's alive

For this, perhaps we should stea^H^H^H^H look to the websites of the
likes of Sun, IBM and Oracle? We probably want lots of news and, in
particular, case studies, indicators of different companies/orgs using
it, stuff about integration.

To geeks we want to say:

    Perl is alive
    Look at the shiny cool features and stuff!

It may be worth looking at the main sites for Python and Ruby, but I
don't know if their design is actually any good. Apple and "cool" geek
sites might be good inspiration. It's probably worth emphasising the
frameworks and so on; some people seem to think that because Perl
doesn't have *one*, say, templating system, that it doesn't have any.

Anthony

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