It's great that the website is getting a refresh. A few comments ...

Why all the fancy javascript ? It adds nothing, and slows down both
the download and general navigation. Save the fancy coding for
sage :-)

On a well designed page you shouldn't need to write "click here' to
indicate where to click, it should be obvious from the layout.

Since people can resize their browsers it helps if the page adapts
gracefully, ie no fixed width pages.

As far as the look of the site goes, there are lots of great free web
designs out there, eg

 http://www.styleshout.com/
 http://freewordpresslayouts.com/

I'd suggest copying one. That's the beauty of open source, we can
learn from the experts.

A clean simple *dynamic* website is the way to attract interest. I'd
suggest that the front page includes a "latest news" section (with RSS
feed), that way people will feel like it's worth coming back to see
what's changed. A dead front page gives the message that nothings
happening. Sage has a thriving community and the web site should
reflect that.

Most of these principles were put into the design of this mathematical
web site designed by a few of my colleagues -

    http://epinet.anu.edu.au/

Here is another one built by the same guys -

    http://apsa.anu.edu.au/                  (note the stylesheet
cribbed from styleshout)

Both these sites are built using Ruby on Rails, but since the sage
developers are all python people, maybe using something equivalent
like Django would be an appropriate framework to build upon. Using a
framework and stylesheets will help keep the site uniform, rather than
a random collection of individual pages.See -

    http://www.djangoproject.com/

-Drew

--
Drew Whitehouse
ANU Supercomputer Facility Vizlab

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