New responsive web presentation:
the UFZ is to be responsive
Every house and building proprietor knows the predicament all too well: every so often a fundamental refurbishment or at least a redecoration is necessary. The same can be said for websites –with the slight difference that the „refurbishment cycles“ for websites are much shorter, given that technology is extremely dynamic and users needs are constantly changing. The UFZ last relaunched its website eight years ago –„in the age of the dinosaurs“ as far as the internet era goes.
Another factor is that, in the world of the Internet there is an entire „circus of end-user devices“: Users access the Internet with very different devices and screen formats – from desktop monitors to tablets and laptops or even smart phones. Users expect the content and the basic design of the web presentation to be the same –irrespective of resolution or end-user device. For this reason, coming up with a so-called responsive web presentation was the primary goal of relaunching the UFZ’s website in February 2016.
At the same time we took the opportunity of using the relaunch as a kind of „spring cleaning“: web editors from research and administration at the UFZ updated or archived outdated pages.
The menu navigation is now more concise with less levels of hierarchy, with so-called portal pages (The UFZ | Carreers/Jobs | Departments | Research | Media/Press | Events) that provide Internet users with a rapid overview of the proceeding content and pages. Officially, the relaunch kicked off at the beginning of February 2015. Some 10,000 web pages have been viewed and assessed since then as to whether they would be included in the relaunch. For many, the relaunch was the perfect opportunity, to discard unnecessary ballast and to restructure webpages. As a result, the UFZ’s new web presentation now only has some 6.200 pages. Great praise goes to the numerous web editors at the UFZ: without their hard work and support, it would not have been possible to relaunch the website with this level of integrity.
Post-relaunch is pre-relaunch
Some finer details often have to be made after a relaunch. For example, typos might have crept in on some of the pages, whereas on other pages the links might be broken, not to mention the odd technical hitch. So that we are able to rapidly correct and optimise such pages, we kindly ask you to report any errors to the following e-mail address: webrelaunch@ufz.de .Many useful actions, functions and elements of the UFZ’s web presentation will also be extended, updated or modernised bit by bit following the relaunch – like for example the slide show/ gallery in the UFZ’s media centre.