Okay, I did some debugging and found that if I do:
SITE_ROOT = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__)))
STATICFILES_DIRS = (
os.path.join(SITE_ROOT, 'static/'),
)
i.e. two iterates of dirname() in settings.py my browser errors are partially taken care of. So that was the solution, just to debug it myself 
