The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, providing more than 45 percent of Federal support for this vital area of national importance. The Office of Science website serves many communities and stakeholders, and with an organized, efficient, and powerful Sitecore backbone in place, authors are able to keep content fresh, with consistent branding and design.
“ The Office of Science sought to create a site that effectively marketed the organization to a diverse audience ranging from taxpayers and government officials to customers and prospective employees. Our team feels privileged to have played a role in helping the Office of Science leverage the Sitecore platform to achieve their goals for the site. „
- Sean Breen, CEO of agencyQ
Challenge
The Office of Science is a complex environment. It is part of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and with an annual budget of nearly five billion dollars, with six major program offices supporting research in a range of different fields of science: Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Basic Energy Sciences, Biological and Environmental Research, Fusion Energy Research, Nuclear Physics, and High Energy Physics. In all the Office of Science supports some 27,000 Ph.D.s, graduate students, engineers, and support staff in research efforts at over 300 universities and other institutions nationwide. The Office of Science also oversees 10 of 17 DOE national laboratories, and operates numerous large-scale scientific user facilities--including large particle accelerators, supercomputers, and other installations. Throughout the year, more than 26,000 researchers use these facilities. An impressive 22 Nobel prizes in the last decade alone have stemmed from work supported by the Office of Science.
This organization’s mission is science for clean energy, applying 21st century scientific experimentation, theory, simulation, and modeling to help break through long standing barriers in energy technology. The Office of Science’s Federal workforce uses their website as a primary information resource when executing this mission. Additionally, the Office of Science needs to broadly communicate its mission, activities, and accomplishments publically, with a requirement that this connection be made to a host of stakeholders, including legislators, governmental decision makers, researchers, and the nation. A significant component in this outreach includes advancing science literacy, often requiring use of language at the layman level to effectively inform the taxpayer of significant scientific breakthroughs – and challenges – that may impact important policy decisions, can enhance the nation’s energy security, or help promote economic growth and prosperity.
Previously, the Office of Science website consisted primarily of decentralized static content managed manually using Adobe Dreamweaver. Editors included many non-expert personnel, and as a result, the content and design was inconsistent throughout the site. In addition, the previous website lacked a comprehensive corporate branding strategy. Moreover, the information architecture suffered from an inconsistent organization with poorly defined structural elements, making the hierarchy of content chaotic. As a result, one challenging phase of this project included the migration of more than 9,000 pages.
Solution
The Office of Science utilized Real Story Group’s CMS Watch reports as one part of the process to identify a content management system (CMS) that would fit its business model. Based on this study, in the Office of Science web team identified the organization as being in the “middle mainstream” category. The web team also examined existing database platforms in use, as well as other integration requirements. It was concluded that the best solution would be one based on the Microsoft ASP.NET framework, while also providing tight integration with existing database-driven components, and enabling Active Directory support. Additionally, an open API was deemed a critical need to accommodate future development requirements. In the web team’s analysis, Sitecore emerged as the clear winner, best meeting all of these needs.
Using Sitecore’s business model, the Office of Science contracted with two Sitecore partners: agencyQ to help with content strategy, information architecture, design, and initial build, and Kapow Software to perform an automated process to migrate the existing content into the information architecture within Sitecore.
“By leveraging the Kapow Katalyst platform’s content migration solution and it’s fully automated, visual design environment, the Office of Science was able to quickly inventory and identify the assets within their existing microsites, extract all HTML and binary content, and transform and manipulate the data into the required format," says Uriah Hakala, Director, Worldwide Services, Kapow Software. "From there, the load was handled seamlessly by a Kapow-Sitecore Connector created by the Sitecore team exclusively for this sort of integration. This automated approach allowed the Office of Science to complete this effort at a fraction of the time of a manual cut and paste, or custom scripted approach.”
Result
Today, the new website is live and the Office of Science is looking forward to taking full advantage of the backbone Sitecore provides for the website, advantageously leveraging the information architecture that agencyQ developed, and applying best practices to grow its web presence. Overall, the structure of the website has been greatly improved, with a primary home page serving as a gateway to all program and support offices.
Other improvements include:
- Accessibility: In the federal space, accessibility is mandated. To meet compliance and accessibility requirements, the Office of Science used a Section 508-compliant video player to accommodate transcripts and closed-captions. Additionally, JavaScript failover solutions were implemented for scenarios where users have scripts disabled in the browser.
- Organized content: The Office of Science has many stakeholders, and the new website makes critical information easy to find and access.
- Common and consistent branding: Previously, each microsite was maintained by separate elements, where common branding was neither emphasized nor managed. Today, the microsites all have a consistent look and feel, where the design is normalized and the content centrally managed.
- Increased efficiency: Today the centrally managed content can be readily and efficiently maintained.
The Office of Science was recently recognized for their site:
“The cleaner-looking and faster web page features articles, videos and more about the innovative research done at national laboratories across the country. An easier-to-use navigation outlines the programs, laboratories, facilities, and universities that compose the Office of Science and features the discoveries and innovations that have come from those constituents.”
-Fermilab Today, March 30, 2011
The Office of Science has plans in the immediate future for a mobile version of their website.
Solution Special Ingredients
- Custom Lucene search indices
- Dynamic dropdown-menu system
- Web Forms for Marketers and the Staging Module
- Third-party, Section 508-compliant, Google Maps Module
Based upon organizational growth, further enhancements to the site’s functionality and evolution are planned including additional integration of Sitecore and/or user-contributed Modules.