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Visitors to Dialogic.nl have likely noticed; Dialogic has had a new website since January 2010. Robbin, Guido, and Barbera talk about the changes compared to the old site and the work that still needs to be done.
Since January 2010, Dialogic has had a new website, what have been the major changes?
"Over the past ten years, Dialogic has conducted hundreds of studies. Almost always accompanied by a comprehensive final report. These are high-quality reports that require a great deal of thinking power and energy. The funny thing is that almost all of these reports are public. We always provide the electronic version for free. This means there is a goldmine of reports, often with data and information not found anywhere else. While the old site did have the reports online, they were difficult to find - it was quite dark in the mine, so to speak. The reports were categorized by Dialogic's fields of work and the search function was not optimal. When searching for a report, visitors needed to know the title of the report or exactly which field of work the report belonged to. With the new website, Dialogic aims to provide more of a library function, making it easy for users to search. On a publication page, visitors are also provided with links to other relevant publications. This is how Dialogic tries to make its reports and knowledge clearly visible.
Barbera adds that the library function is very important but was also challenging to realize. "To create a library with reports and projects, an up-to-date overview is required. Dialogic has good archives of all documents and reports, but a clear overview of which reports could be put on the website and which themes are covered in the report was lacking. Such an overview was necessary to make the website easily searchable. Fortunately, Dialogic had started on MyDialogic a year earlier, an internal portal with information about upcoming, ongoing, and completed projects."
What is the role of MyDialogic for the new website?
Guido explains that by linking the internal portal MyDialogic with the new website, reusable information is optimally utilized. MyDialogic stores meta information about projects within Dialogic. To avoid duplication of work, some of this information is now used for the website. By adding a new advanced XML export to the internal portal, it can be directly imported into the new site. This way, there is one internal system that stores all the information and only needs to be occasionally imported into the database of the new website.
You chose VanEldijk to build a website in Joomla, why was that?
Robbin indicates that the decision to outsource the build was mainly for tactical reasons. "Dialogic has enough IT expertise to build quite complex applications (such as MyDialogic) internally, but it is not our core business - it is better to outsource the work and continue researching in the same time frame." Once the decision was made to outsource the build, an open-source content management system (CMS) was deliberately chosen to increase interoperability and avoid being tied to a specific supplier. According to Guido, Joomla is a CMS that has been present in the market for a long time as a strong competitor to commercial packages. The software has a strong community, and is developed and driven by end-users. "This also significantly improves the quality," Guido continues. "Joomla has proven to hold its ground well in the market over the years and has secured a strong position."
Is the website finished now?
According to Barbera, the website is far from finished. "With this revamped website, we are only at the beginning of the improvement process. For each new project, we will need to consider what can be added to the website. We also want to add more older publications to the website, and for example, provide information about Dialogic and the research methods we use. Additionally, we will regularly assess what visitors find interesting and adjust the site accordingly. Currently, there are around 100 projects online, with 60 publications, but there should be more." Writing texts for these projects and creating searchable PDFs will take some time, she explains.
What are the future plans for the website?
"Your website is never finished," says Guido. "There are always improvements that can be made to the current site. That's why we always keep an eye out for new developments. I would like to present the reports we produce in a more interactive way. Often, interesting data is buried deep in the pdf of the report, but with Web 2.0-like plugins, graphs for example could also be shown in html, making the research more engaging for the public." Barbera aims for more interaction with visitors in the long run. "It is important for people to know that many of our reports are freely available. Then, I would like to hear from interested parties what they think of the reports. Perhaps they can point us to other studies or interesting examples."