A thorough spring-clean for CERN's Web pages

Stand by for Tuesday 17 April when, as announced in the Weekly Bulletin of 2 April (n°14/2001), the new newly-designed users welcome page will be hitting our screens as the default CERN home page. But don't worry, if you've got the blues for the good old blue-green home page it's still in service and, to ensure a smooth transition, will be maintained in parallel until 25 May. But in all likelihood you'll be quickly won over by the new-look pages, which are so much simpler to use.

The aim of this revamp, led by the WPE (Web Public Education) group, is to simplify and introduce a more logical hierarchy into the menus and welcome pages on CERN's Intranet. In a second stage, the 'General Public' pages will get a similar makeover.
The fact is that the number of links on the user pages, and in particular the welcome page, had been proliferating over the years to the point where the pages had become difficult to read and difficult to manage. So the welcome page has been comprehensively stripped down. The five main headings (Scientific programme, Events & Publications, etc...), each containing about a dozen sub-categories and no fewer than 57 links, have been melted down into four headings with just 14 links. But nothing whatsoever has been removed, as the welcome page now simply points to secondary pages, broken down by information category. For example: the new link 'Physics: Experiments and Research' corresponds to the old links 'Experiments', 'R&D' and 'Theory'.
Purged of its plethora of links, the welcome page now gives more prominence to important information such as the day's seminars or special announcements. Furthermore, the comprehensive menus on the secondary pages are a whole lot clearer than before. Another improved feature is the tool bar displayed in the top right-hand corner of all the new pages, which provides links of a practical nature (telephone or e-mail directories, housing and recruitment services, etc.).
The new pages have been available on a trial basis since 2 April and the WPE group would like to take this opportunity to thank all the CERN Web-users for their many suggestions. Your ideas and remarks have given rise to several further improvements. All your suggestions are still very welcome, so please feel free to post them to us at web.communications@cern.ch

A gradual transition

• Monday 2 April: The new user pages go on-line.
• Tuesday 17 April: The new user pages become CERN's default user pages with the old pages still maintained in parallel.
• Friday 25 May: Maintenance of the old pages stops.