Hi
On Jul 3, 2005, at 1:57 PM, Andreas Raab wrote:
PS. And I find your claim about companies not mentioning Squeak "because of the website" very, very strange. If that were true I'm not sure that those companies do understand very much about Squeak and its strengths.
Sure tell that I'm lying if this is what you want to imply. You can say to netStyle people that they are idiot too. But this is what they are living daily. May be adrian will reply on this one?
This would indeed be very interesting.
It's true, we do not show the Squeak website (and if they do not ask, we just say that we use a free open-source Smalltalk) to potential customers for one simple reason: it can give them a very simple reason to shoot us... Let's imagine a bank evaluates our proposal and others for some business critical application. If one guy there does not like us because of whatever reason, he has an easy way to argument against us since the website is the only thing a manager will see about Squeak. If it does not look professional then this definitely will raise questions.
I think, the new website looks much better compared to the old one. From the business point of view, I'd even vote for a new logo. Anyway, I know that there are other groups of users and there are other guys that love the mouse etc. so I don't even think about proposing it. I don't want to start arguing why the old web page is bad (apart from the general look). But, just as an example: the tutorials part of the documentation page (http://www.squeak.org/ documentation/) has 5 dead out of 11 links; or, "Squeak and the Internet" mentions that we have "a very basic telnet client" (wow!!!), but there is not one word about Seaside!
Andreas, you say that maybe we do not understand the strengths of Squeak if we do not mention it because of the website. I don't think that's why, but what is rather the case is that we fear that the *customer* does not understand it which seams to be likely (how should he from looking at that website? Do you really think, he believes that Squeak is capable of managing his bank if he looks at http://www.squeak.org/features/ ?).
I think that the same argument also holds in respect to potential new developers. From the website one has the impression that Squeak is dead and I guess that there are quite some people that do stop there. Again, you can say, well, they do not understand its strengths. Yes, but how should they if they do not get into it when they stop because of the website?
It's just not enough to be good and cool today - one also has to sell it. At least, if one of our goal is to attract new people to Squeak (is that a goal?). As a side mark, a more modern look of Squeak would be good as well. Not for me (I'm really used to it now) but for new users.
So, an appealing website which is up to date and provides relevant and interesting contents does not only serve for selling some contracts but also, and that's important as well, to attract new users, which, I think, has been neglected so far.
Adrian
___________________ Adrian Lienhard www.adrian-lienhard.ch www.netstyle.ch