Website cleanup

The main Debian website is very big: the are atm approximately 8000 pages in english, and the site is actively and continuously being translated into 34 languages, all of which need to be kept in sync. This does not include additional websites like qa.debian.org (including PTS), bugs.debian.org, packages.debian.org, wiki.debian.org, etc.

The site has been growing organically over the past several years and many individuals have been contribution. Unfortunately, this seems to have caused a degradation in the overall structure of the site. In addition, a lot of excellent projects that provide specific information, are being hosted on private machine of developers or associated contributers, and are therefore spreaded over the net located on private domains or debian.net subdomains. These projects might be very hard to find if one doesn't know where to look, even though some (e.g., bts.turmzimmer.net) are extremely valuable.

Furthermore, the design of the pages is maybe not so inviting and crisp as it could be. A redesign of the site might therefore be a good idea, but this should not be the most important part of this SoC project: the site design should match its navigational structure, and not the other way around. Also, many Debian developers like clear and plain pages, without fancy javascript and Flash stuff: the pages should be accessible to anyone (including (visually) disabled people) in any browser (including lynx).

It would be great if a SoC student would be willing to examine the site, reorganize its structure and possibly adjust the page design.

EddyP: The person willing to work on this might find useful (or useless :-) ) my work done on the debian theme for the wiki.

There has been a discussion on debian-www about a contest for new css, and someone did suggestion making it a SoC-project, so I thought I would post it here aswell: http://www.nabble.com/A-contest-for-a-new-css-tf3407361.html

GSoC does not allow documentation work, but other projects like Irssi did have website redesign as one of their projects last year. Something should be doable for Debian aswell :)