Before the Christmas break I promised an alpha version of the new website in February, and we're busy working on this now. It's always an interesting phase of a project: you've done your research, you've tested prototypes, you have your content strategy and you already have some markup; all that's left is to build the thing, right?

One of the aspects of this project is design and develop a theme that could be used for all Drupal websites within CERN.

A few months ago, we started gathering the requirements for this theme and auditing the various use-cases across the organisation. It became clear the those use-cases are extremely varied; from department websites, to individual’s blogs. The editorial need is also quite broad; from a communication tool around working groups, to simple note-recording. This theme had to work quite hard in capturing this broad requirement, but also putting in place tools to allow for slight customisation for users to make their site their own.

We have been through many design and prototype iterations over the past couple of months and we are now at the stage where we will begin to build this out in Drupal. We are going to try to have a first working alpha version sometime in February for you to try out. I'm sure that I will regret setting such an ambitious time frame to get this out, but we have some really good momentum going now and we need to capitalize on it.

As part of our design exploration we have identified an opportunity for some of the more functional elements of the current users' page to be pulled up into a persistent 'dashboard' of tools.

This short video explains some of our thinking and demonstrates how that may work. Apologies in advance for the sound quality.

It's been slow on this blog lately because we have been busy meeting with so many of you in person. Mark, Alex and Nathan have been here at CERN all week and we have had a lot of really great meetings with people from across the CERN community to discuss the latest prototypes.

In his last blog post Mark said we would be sharing the latest prototype iterations last week. We have held off with this because this iteration brought up so many points for discussion and revision - it feels like we're touching upon some really important issues. These discussions are still ongoing, so in the spirit of keeping this process open, here is prototype iteration 3:

http://markboultondesign.com/clients/c/cern/public/iteration3/index.html

Public site

Part of our work has been asking 'what do people want from the CERN site' : curiosity is a big reason people from outside CERN visit. They want to know a little more about what is going on, on the inside, in terms they can understand.

Hi! My name is Cian O’Luanaigh, and I’ve just joined CERN as web editor for the new public site.  

My background is in science journalism; I worked both as a reporter and online producer for New Scientist magazine before my move to CERN.

My focus on this project is to ensure that all content on the site is accurate, engaging, and presented in the most effective way.

For the past couple of months, we’ve been getting to know CERN. We’ve been getting to know how the website is currently used; what is it that people want to do? what do they want to know and who are they? We’ve also been spending our time understanding the current content on the website and assessing what is valuable and what isn’t. All of this talking, listening, researching and strategising has led to some key initial deliverables from us for the project. We’re beginning to define direction and we wanted to share this output with you for feedback.

We are trying to make sure that everyone in the CERN community gets the opportunity to give input to this redesign process. So far we have run online surveys, run presentations for various groups*, conducted face-to-face interviews, had discussions over Skype...