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
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

Reply via email to