ATLAS Public Pages
A proposal for development
ATLAS Outreach Team
Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012
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ATLAS Outreach Team
Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012
Executive Summary
 Problems with Current Site
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Short visitor retention
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Poor design
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Missing key functionality
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Outdated technology
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Inaccessibility of infrastructure
 Proposed Solution
 Drupal
 CERN Hosting
 Market Survey
 Development Plan
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ATLAS Outreach Team
Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012
Problems: Symptoms
 Average Visits
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Average page views / month: 95,000
Average visits / day: 1,500
Average visit duration: 1m 40s
Bounce Rate: 73% (50% considered not good, 70% disaster)
 Who stays or comes back?
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New viewers: 64%
76% of visits last 1-10 seconds
73% of visitors look at 1 page
59% of visitors come once and do not return (in 1 year)
 What do they visit?
 Home 44%, Photos 15%, News 14%, Rest under 3% each
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ATLAS Outreach Team
Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012
Problems: Design
 Lack of clear organizational structure, hierarchy
 Repeated tabs at different levels
 Lack of intuitive navigability
 No consistent navigation bars on each page
 No easy return to original home
 Lack of consistent theme, templates
 ATLAS visual identity should be obvious and consistent
 Navigation bars, tools should be easy to find
 No search functionality
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ATLAS Outreach Team
Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012
Problems: Functionality
 Difficult to Contribute to Content Development
 Example: Educational pages for students, teachers
 Example: Social Science pages for polls, studies
 No protected work space for developers
 No way to bring in collaboration to develop, edit
 Complicated Procedure for News Articles
 Drafts circulated as Word files
 Email Iterations with writers / editors / approvers
 Lack of control over final presentation
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ATLAS Outreach Team
Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012
Problems: Functionality
 Problems with Multimedia Content Handling
 Local copy of images and videos
 No embedding from CDS
 Images not individually linkable
 Missing links to high-resolution sources
 Lack of enforced “Terms of Use” form
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ATLAS Outreach Team
Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012
Problems: Technology
 Mainly static html + some scripts
 No RSS feeds for news
 No content management
 Cannot develop, manage content remotely
 Cannot version content
 Cannot set up work flow for editing, approval
 No interlink between on-line platforms
 Blog, Social Media
 CDS, Other databases
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ATLAS Outreach Team
Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012
Problems: Infrastructure
 Hosting
 Servers, Webmaster located at LBNL
 Web Designer on Outreach budget
 O.K. But 9 time zones away
 Maintenance
 Maintenance provided by LBNL
 Also 9 time zones away
 Unknowns
 For how long will this last?
 Will it always be “free”?
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ATLAS Outreach Team
Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012
Problems: Summary
 Dysfunctional Work Environment
 Wastes effort of Outreach, Management
 Prevents additional contribution from Collaboration
 Control
 Outreach Coordination must control the pages
 We feel impeded to develop
 Projects are on hold because of this
So in summary we may have 700 pages but they are VERY nonuniform and practically unreachable, so we are proposing to
organize them locally in an ordered matter and for this we
need new technology and the guidance of a professional.
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ATLAS Outreach Team
Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012
Solutions: Drupal
 Content Management
 Remote Development, Editing
 Content Sharing, Versioning
 Work Flow with Protection, Publishing
 Themes/Templates for Design
 Searchability, Navigability
 Why Drupal?
 Most commonly used Open Source CMS
 Modules for most common functionality
 Installed, Developed, Maintained by CERN
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ATLAS Outreach Team
Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012
Solution: CERN Hosting
 CERN has offered support
 Drupal installed and used for new CERN pages
 Standard modules in place and being maintained
 DG-COM developers (Dan Noyes) willing to help
 IT-OIS (Tim Bell) offer infrastructure, maintenance
 Now is the time
 Work-flow models recently worked out
 Interfaces to CDS, e-groups, calendars being developed
 Changing now will facilitate our input
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ATLAS Outreach Team
Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012
Solution: Market Survey
 Market Survey (2 Months)
 Drafted Requirements
 Briefed, analysed and invited 8 firms
 Examined proposals, companies, sites
 Interviewed 3, seriously discussed 2
 Lessons from Market Survey
 Instead of developing the project based on assumptions
developers do research through user experience
 First step is a “discovery phase”
 identify problems and deliver a blue print for the project
 Next are design and development Sprints;
 Each sprint has clear deliverables
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ATLAS Outreach Team
Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012
Development Plan
Overall Plan
 Discovery Phase
 Kick-off meeting and discussion of the background of the
project in detail
 5 days of stakeholder research
 Audience research
 Strategy workshops to define the scope of the work
 Architecture diagrams
 Process Flows
 UI sketches and Visual Design Concept
 Development Phase by Sprints
 Design sprint (Experience strategy and informational
architecture, design research, Website prototyping, design
interaction)
 Development sprints (Drupal theming)
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ATLAS Outreach Team
Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012
Proposal
 Supplier: Mark Boulton
 Same supplier used by CERN (recommended by J. Gillies)
 Developer of Drupal community site
 Competitive Market price
 Costs and timeline
 Discovery phase (Jan/Feb): CHF 40K
 Development phase (May/Oct): CHF 50K
Conservatively, we expect this new framework for the website
to live for at least the next 6 years; meaning 15k/year as total
investment
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ATLAS Outreach Team
Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012
Appendices
Details on various aspects of the decisions and the project
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ATLAS Outreach Team
Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012
The CERN Web Pages
 ENTICE Working Group
 Chaired by Dave Foster
 Input, Requirements from Experiments, Departments, Groups
 Made Decision to Install Drupal Open Source CMS
 Porting of CERN Web Pages
 Redo Public Pages
 Provide Templates for Internal Sites
 Train Developers for Divisions, Groups
 Design
 Hired Professional Firm of Marc Boulton
 Designer of Drupal Web Site (and many others)
 Close Interactions with CERN Stakeholders
 Workshops, Meetings, Development Blog
 Identification, Interviews with Target Audience
 Infrastructure Maintenance by IT-OIS
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ATLAS Outreach Team
Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012
CERN Support (Tim Bell)
 Hardware
 CERN IT budget covers the cost of the hardware and maintenance
of those systems assuming reasonable use
 Drupal Maintenance
 Drupal and MySQL are open source so there is no pure software
costs but there are the administration costs which are currently
covered by the IT staff plan
 New Modules
 Installation of new modules can be performed onto each site by
the site manager themselves. There is no need for IT support to
perform these operations
 Modules which are frequently used are reviewed with the ENTICE
user community and may be ‘promoted’ to centrally managed
modules which IT will ensure are kept up to date.
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ATLAS Outreach Team
Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012
CERN Support (Tim Bell)
 Support
 Support for problems is handled through the helpdesk portal
(Drupal Infrastructure). These tickets fall within the standard
support levels for IT services (i.e. working hours only).
 IT provides support for the infrastructure only (i.e. web servers,
database, machines, network, authentication with e-groups,
backup, site creation/cloning/etc). The content creation and
module usage is not covered within the scope of the Drupal
Infrastructure service.
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ATLAS Outreach Team
Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012
Visual identity
 Although we plan to maintain the visual nature of the ATLAS
logo as it is today, we need a more uniform and consistent
visual identity that can be easily used across multiple
platforms.
 Logo needs to be simplified and made easy to use big or small,
B&W or colour, to fit specific shapes
 Logo needs to be a vector image with transparent background
and no shadows to be clearly and easily reproduced
 We need to have a simple and easy to use graphic charter, so
we can better address the hundreds of requests from our event
scan team to publications and our own institutes that more and
more work with professional designers
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ATLAS Outreach Team
Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012
Lessons from CMS
 What CMS Experiment did
 Ported Internal and Public Web Sites
 Set up a structure and then iframed old things
 Internal development team
 With some extensions
 “Created a maintenance problem”
 What they Learned
 Get CERN Support on Board Early in Development
 Use Professional Developers
 Do Not Deviate (Far) from Standards at CERN
 This means back-end – not design!
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