On May 6, 2007, at 3:37 AM, William Stein wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm doing a redesign of the SAGE website to target SAGE much
> more at end users rather than developers (I think the tipping
> point has now arrived, since about 500 people downloaded
> SAGE in the last two weeks...) Anyways, your comments
> on the mockup here would be welcome:
I think it's generally a big improvement.
> http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/was/rc/web/index.html
> (Note that links to actual downloads etc might not work.)
> My questions are mainly:
> (1) do the pages look:
> -- visually appealing
> -- simple and clean
Yes.
> -- convey all the necessary information (i.e., I'm not missing
> key things that used to be there)
I reckon the "Use SAGE online" or "Live Tutorial" should somehow be
more prominent. If I had to pick something on the middle four links
to change, I would change "Developers" to "Live Tutorial". If you're
aiming to suck in the general audience, it's the tutorial. Potential
developers are probably better at picking out the links they need
from the bar at the top without having it shoved down their throat.
(But it's not a big deal.)
I'm not sure I like the slogan "Free Open Source Mathematics Software
for All". The "for All" bit grates a bit with me. Sounds too much
like something a politician would say.
> (2) does the text on the front page reasonably convey what
> SAGE is to somebody who say has never heard of programs
> like GAP and PARI, and just wants to know if SAGE might
> be for them?
Yes.
Where you have "Use SAGE from the command line", I think the
reference to the command line should go to the *end* of the
paragraph, i.e. just start the paragraph talking about the web
interface, which is probably what the general audience wants to see,
and then at the end have a sentence like "You can also run SAGE
scripts from the command line, or use SAGE in the interactive text-
based IPython shell". A humungous proportion of people will get
freaked out when they hear the word "command line" (if they've heard
of "command line" at all).
> (3) Does the front page text seem to much like sales talk?
> Compared to Maple or Mathematica's web pages it's nothing
> (those pages are gut-wrenchingly obnoxious),
> but it might still be too much.
You could lose the sentence "Don't get trapped into using only one
mathematical software system" without really losing anything. It does
sound a bit like a late-night TV ad.
Be a little careful calling MAGMA commercial software. But I don't
know how to rephrase it without getting very wordy.
On the mailing list pages you have sage-devel listed twice, same with
sage-announce.
david
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