Want to work on a homepage site redesign?

[adamghill]

People not understanding what the framework can fully do is a user experience problem. Not a tailwind/css/html problem.

I mean, I agree? If you got a different impression based on what I wrote above, I apologize.

@sodevious

• Identify goals marketing the framework
• Outline what the homepage will say, how it will speak to those goals
• Prioritize goals/content. What is the #1 thing you want people to see/know?
• Determine what works about the existing homepage/site and what doesn’t

To be fair, I did.

Strange that there seems to be an assumption that I just started writing HTML and CSS without thinking about what the end goals for a redesign would be. Now… whether I did things the “proper way” or not is a whole other question. (I probably did not). But, I have multiple docs I’ve been working from and I’m happy to work with others to improve them, or throw them away and start from scratch.

[adamghill]

@thibaudcolas

just trying to make you all aware of our current plans, challenges, and all the aspects

I appreciate that. I will look at the homepage improvements you detailed and try to incorporate them.

plans we’ve had for iterative improvements to the site are in those areas, via content and restructuring, not a new coat of paint just for the homepage?

I think content and restructuring needs to happen. But, respectfully, the homepage needs a lot more than a “new coat of paint”. In my opinion, it’s woefully unhelpful in actually selling Django to anyone who doesn’t already know all of the great parts of the framework.

[adamghill]

We need the redesign to be guided by the findings of user research

There was UX research done 12/2023. Are you suggesting there should be more?

I think we should start at a design mockup and roadmap stage

I disagree, but that’s my personal preference. I make prototype mockups in HTML/CSS because it’s fast enough and feels more real to me. However, I understand others have a different workflow. If someone wants to make a Figma mock or something similar, I’d love to look at it.

We need some branding/color schemes updates

I’m mostly staying away from color altogether other than “Django” green. I have no particular tie to any color schemes and really no opinion about them at all. My issue is more about the positioning of Django in the marketplace.

We need the website to be accessible

Sure. I assume the entire site needs to hit an accessibility standard (something like WCAG 2.2 AA?). In any event, I don’t follow how accessibility needs would require starting at content architecture or how mocks are created.

[carltongibson]

I understand the tension between wanting to do it right on the one hand and just do something on the other.

I think we need to prioritise just doing something in this case.

@wsvincent and I talked with @pauloxnet about getting 20tab onboard back in the summer of 2022. (This was on the back of two years, or more, of totally failing to get any momentum up doing it the volunteer way, but let’s take the 2022 date.)

Knowing how Django rolls, I was very keen to try and get the existing board then to Green Light a just do it iterative approach to updating the site. Timing didn’t quite work, the board elections came, and the new board came in, and they — absolutely rightly — wanted to get up to speed, and take a more measured approach.

But that was three years ago, even taking the 2022 date. And the homepage hasn’t changed at all.

I think we need to be honest about our capacity — or lack of it — to push through projects doing it right on the volunteer effort that we have available.

Otherwise we’ll be here in another three years, still with nothing changed.

I get that we want it all. But we’re frozen. We need to get out of our own way.

§

Meanwhile, the same refrain continues to be heard — Django is in existential danger from its inability to compete with the Next.jses, FastAPIs, or whatever — put in your own one — of the world.

This was the exact same angst we faced in 2022 (and earlier). The exact same points. The exact same concerns.

The biggest challenges aren’t technical. (@FarhanAliRaza is busy proving that) They’re that we’re not communicating what Django has to offer. If we’re losing share™, that’s why.

I take the long view. I’m not particularly worried about Django. I think the concerns are overplayed, and that if there’s a more popular Python web framework, that’s OK. (It’s old as Django itself that Django faces imminent death.) Nonetheless I keep hearing talks and reading posts about how folks are concerned. (And maybe eventually the predictions of doom turn out right. )

BUT this question here. Are we capable of updating the website? is the big one. It’s the most pressing topic Django faces.

I put it to you that doing it right has proven to be too slow. I suggest we authorise @adamghill (and a small team) to just do something — it won’t be bad! — and we adopt a policy of making iterative changes, rather than continuing to wait for all the "i"s to be dotted and all the "t"s to be crossed.

All that work is important — but there are obvious changes that could have been made years ago already.

[thibaudcolas]

@carltongibson

I get that we want it all. But we’re frozen. We need to get out of our own way.

Just want to be clear this is false, and if some of you think this, it’s simply because you’re not aware of the work that’s been going on over the last 12 months, and of the many people working on this who are very much not frozen. Capacity building isn’t easy. Our coordinated “website + fundraising + accessibility” teams chose to do it mostly behind the scenes by assessing what gaps in expertise we have and what incremental steps we could take.

The point of doing it “right” is that it scales better. It scales better people-wise because we get to involve experts with the tasks most relevant to them, time-wise because if other things come up we don’t lose all momentum (urgent fundraising needs! 20th birthday!). And lots of this work we need not just for the website but for our overall marketing (social media, in-person events, etc).

In my opinion we really don’t need a quick fix here of course it’d be better to have a quick fix than not, but what we’re lacking and working on is more fundamental capacity building on marketing / UX and UI design. The homepage is just one of many examples of the bigger pattern.

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So @adamghill with all this in mind if you still want to work on the homepage only / homepage first, I’d like to hear (not necessarily here on the forum):

• Your strategy so you still get the right input from those teams already working on this (accessibility, website, fundraising, or a potential marketing team). Would you join one of them? Liaise with the team chairs?
• How you envision we would be able to reuse this homepage work for other areas of the site / other marketing tasks (if there’s no reuse planned that’s fine too)
• Who you expect to review your work? Is it just here “free for all community input on the forum”? Do you form a new team of your own? Expect some of the existing teams to pick this up?

From my side – I’ll take this as feedback we need to communicate our current plans better and work with the chairs and co-chairs of our different groups (@priyapahwa @tom @SaptakS @sabderemane @erosselli) working on this to publish said plans

[thibaudcolas]

Oh - if you want to chat about this live DSF office hours today in about 8 hours, join link at the bottom of the page

[adamghill]

@thibaudcolas

Your strategy so you still get the right input from those teams already working on this (accessibility, website, fundraising, or a potential marketing team). Would you join one of them? Liaise with the team chairs?

Happy to join any team that will have me. I leave it up to your discretion which team(s) makes the most sense. Or if just liaise-ing achieves the same goal, maybe that’s preferable? Also, if there are documents available from certain teams to give me (or others) context, let me know.

How you envision we would be able to reuse this homepage work for other areas of the site / other marketing tasks (if there’s no reuse planned that’s fine too)

IMO, this is something to figure out with the (still hypothetical) marketing team. It doesn’t seem like a blocker, unless I am missing something critical.

Who you expect to review your work? Is it just here “free for all community input on the forum”? Do you form a new team of your own? Expect some of the existing teams to pick this up?

My first post in this thread was pretty hand-waving about a process for a few reasons:

• I wanted to get a temperature of whether people thought this was a good idea or not (tbh, no clue how to read this based on this thread – some people seem to think this is important and others apparently not at all )
• I do not know the process to actually make changes to the site (personally, I think that’s fine – most devs who make PRs to Django itself never manage a release – ideally devs can iterate on the website in the same way)

All that being said, I am happy to follow someone’s lead here. It has been mentioned in the thread that I could present something to the board – that’s fine with me. I can form a team if that’s a requirement to make changes. If there is another team that this naturally falls to, that’s also fine, but I’m explicitly not trying to make more work for someone else.

If it isn’t already abundantly clear, I am mostly a “let’s try something and see what happens” type of person. If there is a process, I can follow it – but, it’s hard to follow a process that I don’t know about. In the (perceived) absence of a process, I’m also willing to just do things. Hopefully without stepping on too many toes.

That all being said, there were a couple of requests for docs that I have in various states of completion. I’m going to clean them up and post them here in the next few days – maybe at least they will be helpful to someone.

[adamghill]

As requested, I have written up a Google doc with the following information in multiple tabs:

• Introduction (why should we update the homepage and why do I personally care about this)
• Homepage Goals (what do I think the goals of the homepage should be)
• Competitor Analysis (what are my thoughts when evaluating the homepages of other server side frameworks)
• Homepage Analysis (what are my thoughts about the current Django homepage)

I will stress this is all my opinion and I am not trying to make light of the current work being done, the current design, or anyone else’s effort. I think we all want the same thing at the end of the day – to improve Django, increase adoption, and share how great Django (and the community) is.

I would appreciate any feedback and constructive criticism of the document I wrote up, along with explicit next steps to continue to make progress.

Django Homepage Redesign

[ericholscher]

I feel like people have been talking around this, but I wonder if it’s possible to just add the “One framework, endless possibilities” content to the existing home page, with the existing design, as a first step? It seems everyone agrees that updated content is important, and iteration on the existing site is likely to be approved, so can we just start making incremental content improvements with the existing styles as a quick win and bias toward action?

[adamghill]

I have a prototype of an updated homepage, however it is a little bit of a departure from the current styles, i.e. standard Tailwind CSS, different font, etc.

Next action items for me:

• new version of my prototype that follows the Django website style guide
• fork the djangoproject repo and see how to add new content into the existing homepage

[carltongibson]

Great work Adam. Thanks for the energy here.

The website is out of Steering Council hands, but I’m going to bring this topic up anyway. Promoting the ecosystem, and what Django already has to offer was one of our big three goals for the term, so I’m hoping we can find a way for this to advance.

Edit: the doc you posted is great. Did you get any feedback?

[Antoliny0919]

I really hope this project is successfully completed.

I don’t have much development experience, so I haven’t been using Django for very long. I think the first version I used was 5.0? or 5.1?.

Reading this, I realized that the Django homepage has maintained the same design for 10 years. I’ve already thought it would be great if the Django homepage were redesigned.

After reading the document Adam wrote, I could clearly feel his intention that the Django homepage should be redesigned. I hope there will be a better way to attract sponsors effectively and that the core technologies Django provides (Admin, ORM, Template, Form, etc.) will be better showcased on the site.

It’s impossible to represent all the vast technologies Django offers, but at the very least, I hope the documentation related to core technologies will have excellent accessibility.

I haven’t personally used other frameworks, but I still think Django has a promising future in the long term. (This is just my personal opinion ) From what I can tell, the Django organization is very well-structured and made up of kind and passionate people. I also think they’re doing a good job recruiting new contributors, which is a key aspect of open source.

(Maybe Django will truly shine in the late 2020s?)

Anyway, Good luck, Adam