ATLAS Public Pages A proposal for development

Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012ATLAS Outreach Team 2

Executive Summary  Problems with Current Site  Short visitor retention  Poor design  Missing key functionality  Outdated technology  Inaccessibility of infrastructure  Proposed Solution  Drupal  CERN Hosting  Market Survey  Development Plan Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012ATLAS Outreach Team 3

Problems: Symptoms  Average Visits  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?  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 Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012ATLAS Outreach Team 4

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 Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012ATLAS Outreach Team 5

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  Iterations with writers / editors / approvers  Lack of control over final presentation Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012ATLAS Outreach Team 6

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 Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012ATLAS Outreach Team 7

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 Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012ATLAS Outreach Team 8

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”? Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012ATLAS Outreach Team 9

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 non- uniform 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. Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012ATLAS Outreach Team 10

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 Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012ATLAS Outreach Team 11

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 Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012ATLAS Outreach Team 12

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 Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012ATLAS Outreach Team 13

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) Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012ATLAS Outreach Team 14

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 Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012ATLAS Outreach Team 15

Appendices Details on various aspects of the decisions and the project Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012ATLAS Outreach Team 16

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 Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012ATLAS Outreach Team 17

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. Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012ATLAS Outreach Team 18

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. Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012ATLAS Outreach Team 19

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 Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012ATLAS Outreach Team 20

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! Web Proposal - 3 Dec 2012ATLAS Outreach Team 21