title: I am not able to load the staticfiles in my templates. What am I doing wrong?
body: <p>I need to incorporate css in my templates to help them look better, but inspite of adding the static url and root, I am just not able to load it in my template. I am attaching the relevant code here. Please tell me what am I doing wrong. Thanks in advance.</p>
  
  <p>settings.py</p>
  
  <pre><code>    BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)))
      TEMPLATE_DIR = os.path.join(BASE_DIR,'templates')
      STATIC_DIR = os.path.join(BASE_DIR,'static')
  
      STATIC_URL = '/static/'
      STATIC_ROOT = [STATIC_DIR,],
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>index.html</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE html&gt;
  {% load staticfiles %}
  &lt;html lang="en"&gt;
   &lt;head&gt;
  &lt;link href="{% static 'css/index.css' %}"&gt;
  &lt;/head&gt;
  </code></pre>