[Bioperl-l] a Main Page proposal

[Jonathan Cline]

Throwing this out there:

- there should be a screenshot section (whatever that means for bioperl)

- the grammar of the beta page should be more correct.

"Welcome to BioPerl, a community effort to produce Perl code which is
useful in biology. "
==> "Welcome to BioPerl, a community effort to produce Perl code serving
as useful tool in the field of Biology."

>>The About section is a good example. I would bet most visitors to the
BioPerl website skip over the About section because they already know what
BioPerl is, ...  Dave<<


Most good software front pages say, in a couple sentences, "what it is
and what it's for", including pictures (as screenshots).

I would bet a ton of visitors don't know what bioperl is, or what it is
used for, or how it can benefit.  There is likely a metric for this (web
stats) as the ratio of new page visits that bounce away vs. new
clickthrus from the front page to the download or docs section.   i.e. a
visitor found the page and didn't continue reading.  I don't really know
all the things bioperl is good for and I've been reading about it here &
there for a while.

I like the following from the About and I believe it fits well on a
front page, expanding "toolkit" to "software library":

"What is Bioperl? It is an open source bioinformatics software library
used by researchers all over the world. If you're looking for a script
built to fit your exact needs you probably won't find it in Bioperl.
What you will find is a diverse set of Perl modules that will enable you
to write your own script, and a community of people who are willing to
help you. "

The old school definition of software library is something like: "useful
routines which can be used by an application (& not itself an
application)" which is basically the description above.

I also like the intro from wikipedia, which I found more informative
about bioperl, and would be good for a front page:

'BioPerl [1] is a collection of Perl modules that facilitate the
development of Perl scripts for bioinformatics applications. It has
played an integral role in the Human Genome Project.[2]  It is an active
open source software project supported by the Open Bioinformatics
Foundation.  In order to take advantage of BioPerl, the user needs a
basic understanding of the Perl programming language including an
understanding of how to use Perl references, modules, objects and methods."

The screenshots could also include pics of books on bioperl or perl+bio,
that would be neat.  (Tisdall's book comes to mind here)



## Jonathan Cline
## jcline at ieee.org
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