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The Debian web updates its homepage and prepares for a major renewal



Dear all,

Today the Debian website displays a new homepage. The web team has been
working on renewing the structure, content, layout and scripts that
build the site since the last team sprint on March 2019. There has been
work mainly in two areas:  Creating a new homepage and removing or
updating obsolete content.

We have two main goals in mind: To simplify the front page in order to
make it more readable and attractive to newcomers, and to show the
social aspect of the Debian project as well as the operating system that
we develop.

Although this took more time than we wanted and we don't consider this
new homepage final, we think it's a good first step to a much better web
site.

As we continue to work on restructuring the Debian website, we would
like to get help from the wider team, the community and are also
considering to gather external help, since we're a small group of people
and also participate in other Debian teams. The next steps we expect to
take are:
- Improve the CSS and layout in general.
- Review of the the existing content, with the claim to improve the
structure and refreshing content.
- A new "download" section that would merge the "CD" and "distrib"
folders and helps users to find the most suitable Debian image, guide
them to the desired download and finally help to verify and install Debian.
- Improve the icons of the homepage, and also for other relevant sections.

We're currently not considering changing the website development
infrastructure. Pages are written in Website META Language (often
abbreviated as “WML”), with scripts written in Perl or Python and
reusable tags defined in templates), built with Makefiles. The layout
and appearance is mainly handled via CSS files only (we don't use
JavaScript for now). We're conscious that this infrastructure is quite
different from the "web developing state-of-art" but we feel that it
would be really difficult to switch entirely to a new system and we
prefer to focus on simplifying the content and structure first.

How can you help

* Test the new homepage: We particularly welcome feedback related to
accessibility and usability.
* Help translate the new homepage and related pages to your language.
* If you are a web developer or designer, and want to help in the tasks
we mentioned in this article, contact us.
* We always welcome help on fixing or working on our list of bugs. :-)
* Help documenting how web site content is handled.

If you want to participate in the Debian web team, please consider
reading the [pages related to the
website](https://www.debian.org/devel/website/). You can contact us in
our public mailing list
[debian-www@lists.debian.org](mailto:debian-www@lists.debian.org) and
our IRC channel #debian-www.

Thanks everybody who made this possible!

Kind regards,
-- 
Laura Arjona Reina
https://wiki.debian.org/LauraArjona

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