I had to make a similar argument at my job. You are going to have to convince people who are rightly skeptical, wont appreciate the all the core technological arguments, and really only care about time and cost.
So, make a business case, not a technical case. Focus on: 1) tangible business benefits 2) reduce risk On the benefits side, I'd take your "speed of development" argument and think of specific features that you could add to help their business: - better user experience, better data collection and analysis, etc - can you factor out some licensed software costs (SQLServer, etc) - does the current site support foreign language -- will they need that? - what about hosting? In general I think you could make the case that hosting Django and an opensource platform is easier than ASP On the risk side, you need to convince them that your 2-week estimate is valid; you should provide them with some supporting material that breaks down the 2 weeks into specific tasks so that they will have more confidence in it. They also are probably skeptical about Django's traction. I'd visit Django Sites (http://www.djangosites.org/) and get a list of retailers that use Django to show them they would not be the first to do so. Also, go to a big job board (HotJobs, Craigslist, etc) and do a search in your location jobs listing "Django". That really helped at my job when my VP saw how many job listings were posted because he felt like it was an active market and that he would be able to find Django experience in the future. good luck On Jun 19, 6:02 am, gnijholt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Ok I need some thoughts on the following. For a client, we need to > redesign their website. The back-end was coded a couple of years ago > in classic ASP. It's fairly complex, with a webshop, uploading and > parsing of excel files with new collections of clothing, and stuff > like that. It took people about six months to build it back then. > > Personally, I think now is the moment to also revamp the back-end, but > I'm having trouble to explain the reasons to non-tech people (bosses > and the client). I reckon I could build most of the back-end within a > week or two in Django. The problem is that neither the client nor the > boss care about the technology, as long as it works. They will not pay > for an upgrade of the back-end to newer technology, unless I can back > up this decision with valid points. So why should they switch to > something like Django? I can come up with technological points, such > as maintainability (less LoC), speed of development in the future... > > Thanks --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---