Today, the Debian website displays a new homepage. Since the most recent web team sprint in March 2019, we have been working on renewing the structure, content, layout and scripts that build the site. There has been work mainly in two areas: removing or updating obsolete content, and creating a new homepage which is more attractive to newcomers, and which also highlights the social aspect of the Debian project in addition to the operating system we develop.

Although this took longer than we would have liked, and we don't consider this new homepage final, we think it's a good first step towards a much better web site.

The web team will continue to work on restructuring the Debian website. We would like to appeal to the community for help, and are also considering external assistance, since we're a small group, whose members are also involved in other Debian teams. Some of the next steps we expect to walk are improve the CSS, icons, and layout in general, and review of the content, to have a better structure.

If you would like to help, contact us. You can reply to the version of this article (with some more details) published in our public mailing list or chat with us in the #debian-www IRC channel (at irc.debian.org).

The Debian Web team held a sprint for the first time, in Madrid (Spain) from March 15th to March 17th, 2019.

We discussed the status of the Debian website in general, review several important pages/sections and agreed on many things how to improve them.

For the sections we want to reorganise (mainly the homepage and a new section "download" which will group our current "CD" and "distrib" sections) , we have designed this workflow:

• Create branches in the webwml repo,
• Agreed on the new or modified content (started already during the sprint), and work on them further after the sprint
• Review a lot of related open bugs to see if we can address them with the new content (done during the sprint)
• Create bug reports for the things that cannot be solved quickly to keep them tracked (started during the sprint)
• We agreed we should get further help from web designers/information architects (pending)
• Once the English version is more or less settled, call for translations on the branch (pending)
• If we have English and the main translations ready, merging into the master branch (pending)
• We will try to have at least the homepage and the download section ready for the Buster release.

We also agreed that the press delegates should decide what new News entry is worth to be posted in the homepage instead of showing the last 6 entries.

For some other pages or areas (e.g. doc/books, misc/merchandise, /users) we found that the content is outdated and the team can not maintain it, we agreed in issuing a call for help (request for adoption) and if we cannot find volunteers for those pages/areas, we'll remove the content or move it to wiki.debian.org at the end of 2019.

We have agreed that we'll need to reduce the size (number of pages) of the website (*see some numbers about statistics at bottom) so it's more sustainable to keep the whole website up-to-date (content wise), so we'll remove some pages having content already covered in other pages, having content that currently is easy discoverable with a web search engine, can be maintained better in the wiki, etc.

We have talked a bit about certain other aspects like point release workflow, the build time of the website, team memberships and governance. In general the sprint has shown that for most of the discussed topics the migration to git as VCS and the existence of Salsa is a huge step forward for the usability and attractiveness for contributors of the webwml repository.

The core webteam is happy that the sprint has also attracted new people to jump in and which are also members of the webteam now. We welcome Thomas Lange and Carsten Schoenert in our team!

Finally, we have passed time together to socialize and knowing each other better, and got very motivated to continue working on the web.

Left to right: Rhonda D'Vine, Laura Arjona Reina, Thomas Lange, Carsten Schoenert, Steve McIntyre

A more detailed report has been sent to the debian-www mailing list.

The participants would like to thank all donors to the Debian project who helped to cover a large part of our expenses.