A new Indiana Geological and Water Survey website, designed with public outreach and education in mind, will go live Tuesday, Nov. 7. The URL will be the same as the previous site: igws.indiana.edu.
An IGWS staff committee has been meeting for more than a year to talk through content and navigation for the new site. Kevin Fuller, a 2022 graduate of IU’s Luddy School of Informatics and Computing, was hired as the IGWS web developer in July 2022, and his primary project has been to migrate content from an older web framework to a more modern platform.
Fuller did not know ColdFusion, the language used to write the old site. But that wasn’t his biggest challenge; it was the sheer size and volume of the content. The old site also didn’t work well on mobile devices, load time was slow, and many pages were buried under multiple headings. “The general rule is, if somebody can’t find something in 5 seconds, they’ll leave your page,” Fuller said. “We need to make it really, really obvious that we’re what they need, if we are what they need.”
The IGWS first launched a website in the late 1990s and it has been redesigned at least five times since then, most recently in 2017, said Matt Johnson, assistant director for information services. Some pages had been up for at least 10 years. IU has requested that all websites be inspected for dated content and updated frequently. “Newer content is more important in the way that web content is consumed now, in quick bites vs. ‘I’m going to read for an hour on the website,’” Johnson said.
The number of pages has been reduced significantly: more than 5,000 on the old site vs. 35 on the new. New pages can be added, though, as staff identify interest in or needs for additional content. Committee members studied page views on the old site to identify which received at least 2,000 views in the past year, and those pages were recreated on the new site. In addition to writing nearly all the new content, Education and Outreach Coordinator Polly Sturgeon also took screenshots of all pages from the old website and uploaded them to IGWS Digital Collections.
Readers who are interested in delving more deeply into geologic research are encouraged to read peer-reviewed articles published in the IGWS’s Indiana Journal of Earth Sciences and other journals. A “publications” link exists under each main category of research listed on the homepage: “hazards,” “water,” “energy,” and “minerals.”
The new IGWS site is also compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was a strategic plan goal.
Four applications are not yet available on the new site: the Petroleum Database Management System (PDMS), the Indiana Water Balance Network (IWBN), the Indiana Geologic Names Information System (IGNIS), and environmental assessments. These will remain live on the old website at legacy.igws.indiana.edu for at least a year until they are redeveloped in the new framework.
Fuller hopes that visitors to the redesigned site will find it faster, more attractive, and easier to navigate. “I think there’s going to be a decent number of people who are going to be frustrated with the changes because change is like that, but hopefully people can get used to it pretty quick because it’s a necessary change.”