I remember sometime in 2014 being told about pandas & numpy and trying to find out more about it. And some of my friends (who haven't coded before) are in a similar position now. And so I'm reminded that the first thing you see is not compelling to a typical new user (e.g. someone who knows Excel and a bit of SQL):

First result when searching for 'pandas' on Google:

Some comparisons:

Jupyter Notebook

Tensorflow, which is not exactly for beginners:

Tidyverse is a bit better:

Pandas' GitHub Readme is better, but still doesn't immediately tell you what you can achieve (and is overly bashful - I think pandas can say that it has hit that goal)

Proposal

...what do people think about redoing the opening page to make it more immediately appealing to new users - particularly those who don't have an engineering background?

If so, what do people think should be included?

Comment From: chris-b1

100% agree the homepage could use some love - I'm personally a bit skeptical of the overly sales-y style of, e.g. TensorFlow, but it also probably works.

Maybe could have different introductions for different audiences? Like, a 'who are you?' question with X categories (just making these up) - Excel/SQL/other data analysis tool user who wants to learn python/pandas - Python user who wants to learn data science tools - [numpy/scientific python user, never used pandas] - [R user!]

Comment From: jorisvandenbossche

Also completely agree, and I personally think the landing page of the docs is even worse .. (although, it is has more or less the content of the readme, but presented very badly)

I think that introduction text has not been touched for 5 years or so .. :-)

Maybe could have different introductions for different audiences? Like, a 'who are you?' question with X categories (just making these up)

Big +1.

I would also like to see a reorganisation of the doc structure / navigation, question is a bit whether we want to better integrate main website and docs, or keep them separated.

Anyhow, main problem is that this is just a big chunk of work for someone to do.

Comment From: jorisvandenbossche

I think that introduction text has not been touched for 5 years or so .. :-)

Correction: git blame says not 5 but 6 years

Comment From: mroeschke

The home page has undergone an overhaul since this issue so probably best to close this for now and open up specific issues with specific points to change: http://pandas.pydata.org/