Statistics Iceland New website Þorbjörg Magnúsdóttir

Statice.is Launched 20 October 2015 on the World Statistics Day. New design and architecture. New content management system. New PX-web. New subject classification. New logo.

Went well (1) We managed to move almost all content from the old website to the new. The new content management system, Umbraco has various development possibilities. The new web is much faster than the old one (most of the time). Updating PX-web at the same time was hard work but was the right thing to do (was 2005).

Went well (2) Staff did well and the spirit in the web group was always high. A new web developer was very good. Scheduled daily web meetings which were prosperous. Used Trello cards (collaboration system) which was useful when trying to complete all the final small tasks.

Went well (3) A presentation on the new web for other SI staff went well. The web looked kind of good. Automated a very popular table on indices.

Less well (1) Took too long. Went through three IT heads and two cms revisions. The requirement analysis not thorough enough. No user testing. Trying to meet too many and too diverse needs at the same time. (px, cagegories, logo, cms, structure …)

Less well (2) Working in the content, basic technology and the design at the same time. Moving publications from the old web was difficult and did not work completely, which caused a lot of manual labour. The search did not work well at first. Did not prioritise as we wanted.

Less well (3) The company that sold us the cms merged with an other bigger firm and then demerged. Often difficult to reach the cms firm. The new web was in and out of priority for too long. The presentation in-house was too close to the release day so staff were sending comments on little things we already knew of.

Less well (4) Launching suddenly decided by top management and accepted by IT head who then left before the release. Lack of staff. Financial reasons. Blurry responsibility. Decisions often made by those not involved. New logo decided just before release.

Now Details which have not been fixed frustrating. No new web developer. The focus has not been on the cms. Weak editor. Too many users are frustrated when trying to find statistics.

Future Rethink the architecture. Combine Icelandic and English PX-tables. Improve the chart editor. Built on px data in Json form with Highcharts.js (needs work). Improve user service, including a cart where users can select several tables and save to one Excel sheet where they will be updated automatically.