[R] www.r-project.org

[Duncan Murdoch]

Romain Francois wrote:
> Dear R users and developpers,
> 
> My question is adressed to both of you, so I choose R-help to post it.
> 
> Are there any plans to jazz up the main R website : http://www.r-project.org
> The look it have now is the same for a long time and kind of sad 
> compared to other statistical package's website. Of course, the 
> comparison is not fair, since companies are paying web designers to draw 
> lollipop websites ...

There have been various suggestions along these lines (check the 
archives), but there are a number of constraints that make the problem 
difficult:

  - there are two web sites, www.r-project.org and cran.r-project.org 
with different needs.  In particular, CRAN must be very low tech because 
it is mirrored on very diverse sites (including local copies, e.g. on a 
CDROM).

  - There are a lot of busy people who need to edit these pages 
occasionally, so a stable, standard, simple setup is extremely 
desirable.  That means simple HTML to be edited in a text editor, no 
special CMS.

These requirements are quite hard to meet, so expect changes to the web 
sites to be very time consuming, and possibly rejected en masse in the end.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> My first idea was to organize some kind of web designing contest.
> But, I had a small talk with Friedrich Leisch about that, who said that 
> I shouldn't expect too many competitors.
> So, what about creating a small team, create a home page project and 
> then propose it to the core team.
> It goes without saying it : The core team has the final word.
> 
> What do you think ? Who would like to play ?
> 
> Romain
>