We're parents, and we spend a lot of time finding and arranging extracurricular activities for our kids. We noticed how hard it was to find information about local activities on the web, let alone sign up for them online. Talking to other parents and people at the activity providers we like, we decided we could help both sides.

Community Signup makes it easy (and free!) for activity providers to list their offerings online. We also provide a specialized search and other tools to help participants find activities that fit their interests, schedule and budget.

If organizations also want to provide online registration, we provide a simple, secure way to do that, at really reasonable prices — Community Signup should cost less than half of some of the other solutions we've seen.

Rubicon was looking for a site that non-technical staff could maintain. Their old site was hard to update and they were having trouble getting company news out in a timely fashion. Django's admin interface, tailored to look like the rest of the site and provide custom mailing list management, fit the bill at reasonable cost.

Now they can edit their site's pages, publications, and news items through the web, without involving their technical support staff.

Velcura's static site needed an overhaul to allow them to more easily publish news about their company. Django was a natural fit; they can now maintain their site with just a browser and have the updates automatically published via Atom feeds. The site also includes a quick and effective search. In short, the site is much more useful for journalists, investors and commercial partners.

On the front end, Velcura commissioned a graphic designer for the site's look; I translated the design to HTML and CSS and did the JavaScript animation on the home page.

For this psychology practice I chose cool greens and grays and a natural background image. (The steps are in Shukkei-en, a garden in Hiroshima, which is so beautiful you'd never guess it was just over a kilometer from the hypocenter of the atomic bomb blast.) The type, whitespace and straightforward layout complete the relaxed, professional feel.

The site is built with Django, our spam-free contact form, and a secure file exchange area that allows the practice to easily share data with their vendors and colleagues. It can handle arbitrarily large uploads, with nifty AJAX progress indicators.

This is our playground; Kirstin blogs about her other interests and I get to use her site as a guinea pig for new Django tricks. We wrote the blog application for the site, which includes such goodies as image management, WYSIWYG editing in the administrative interface, and a comment system that's a little more functional than the default Django contrib application, while preventing spam via a honeypot based on the ideas here. We use the same honeypot technique on the contact forms on all our sites, and it has virtually eliminated spam.