Announcing a redesign of the Django websites

The Django project is excited to announce that after many years, we're launching a redesign of our primary website, our documentation site and our issue tracker.

Django's website has been largely unchanged since the project was launched back in 2005, so you can imagine how excited we are to update it. The original design was created by Wilson Miner while he was working at the Lawrence Journal-World, the newspaper at which Django was created.. Wilson's design has held up incredibly well over the years, but new design aesthetics, and technologies such as mobile devices, web fonts, HTML5 and CSS3 have drastically changed the way websites are built.

The old design was also focused on introducing a new web framework to the world. Django is now a well-established framework, so the website has a much broader audience -- not just new Django users, but established users, managers, and people new to programming. This redesign also allows us to shine a spotlight on areas of the community that have historically been hidden, such as the Django Software Foundation (DSF), the community of projects that support Django developers (such as people.djangoproject.com and djangopackages.com), and the various educational and consulting resources that exist in our community.

This redesign is the result of multiple attempts and the collaboration of a number of groups and individuals. Work on the redesign started in 2010. Initially, a number of people (including Christian Metts and Julien Phalip) tried to produce a new design as individual efforts; however, these efforts stalled due to a lack of momentum. In 2012, the DSF developed a design brief and put out a call for a volunteer team to redesign the site. The DSF received a number of applicants and selected interactive agency Threespot to complete the design task. For a number of reasons (almost entirely the DSF's fault), this design got most of the way to completion, but not 100% complete.

Earlier this year, Andrew McCarthy took on the task of completing the design work including a style guide for future expansions. The design was then handed over to the DSF's website working group to convert that website into working code.

Since everyone is a volunteer on this team we'd like to name them individually: Adrian Holovaty, Audrey Roy, Aymeric Augustin, Baptiste Mispelon, Daniel Roy Greenfeld, Elena Williams, Jannis Leidel, Ola Sitarska, Ola Sendecka, Russell Keith-Magee, Tomek Paczkowski and Trey Hunner. One of the DSF's current fellows Tim Graham also helped by finding bugs and reviewing tickets. Of course we couldn't have done it without the backing of the DSF board of directors over the years.

Now we'd like to invite you to share in the result of our efforts and help us making it even better. Please test-drive the site and let us know what you think.

If you find a bug -- which we're sure some will -- open a ticket on the website's issue tracker. If you want to contribute directly to the site's code please don't hesitate to join us on Freenode in the channel #django-websites.

We also wouldn't mind if you'd tell us about your experience on Twitter using the hashtag #10YearsLater, or by tweeting at @djangoproject.

So now, without further ado, please check out the new site djangoproject.com, the documentation docs.djangoproject.com and our issue tracker code.djangoproject.com.

That's all for now. Happy coding, everyone!

...and we'll see you all again in 2023 when we launch our next redesign :-)