Towards an informative, responsive and maintainable website.
The EST website is the main entry point of information about the project. All the material generated by the project is made publicly available through the EST website. This includes news, articles, scientific information, image galleries, and private documents for the collaborators, among other resources.
Starting in March 2020, a significant effort was made to keep the EST website updated. A major overhaul was carried out by the Project Office, with a complete redesign resulting in a modern look and feel. The new interface supports multiple devices by means of a Responsive Web Design (RWD) approach. At the same time, the website remains graphically attractive, simple and informative due to the use of a template supporting Joomla 3.9 and bootstrap 4.0.
RWD is an approach that makes web pages render properly on a variety of devices and screen sizes. It also reacts to common user behavior such as screen orientation changes (vertical/horizontal). That approach offers various advantages such as an optimized user experience for different devices (desktop, mobiles and tablets) and proper SEO (Search Engine Optimization) results, as the Google search engine rewards responsive websites. Moreover, multiple-device support is an important objective due to the increase in internet traffic using mobile devices. Indeed, in May 2020, mobile devices accounted for up to 50.4 percent of the total web page views worldwide.
In order to follow a RWD approach, new tools were added to the EST website to facilitate the generation of responsive and eye-catching content. The most relevant is the page editor used to rebuild the Homepage that can generate responsive content with a modern look and feel based on a variety of layouts and building blocks.
Not only the general appearance has been improved, but also the contents and maintainability. The EST Communication Office helped to migrate all the contents to the new website, adding and deleting material as necessary. Also a Funding section was created. Another area that experienced deep changes is the News section. Apart from a revamped design, a significant improvement was achieved with the addition of a tool to build news listings automatically. This tool gather data and meta-data from the news articles and generate well organized listings, reducing the maintainability cost of the section. Since the Joomla article editor is still an important tool for content generation, the Project Office has set new building blocks and sample codes to simplify and to improve the content generated through this editor. These elements positively affect site maintenance by providing a common solution to recurrent problems of web content generation such as positioning and responsiveness of the graphic material.
As an extra tool, a global search facility has been implemented. The EST website now contains a text search field on the top of the site that eases the process of finding relevant articles and content related to the criteria set by the user.
From July 2019 we are employing Google Analytics to generate statistics on the use of the website. According to this service, in the period June-November 2020 we had 2,955 unique users, who started 4,872 sessions and visited 18,767 pages (an average of 3.85 pages per session). The mean session duration was 3.5 minutes. The top ten visitor countries were Spain, USA, Germany, Italy, UK, Japan, China, India, France, and Argentina, in that order. These numbers clearly show the importace of the website to promote the EST project as a whole.