Our website has been active for many years (since 2007, I believe) and its content has grown a lot since then. Coding practices, content management, design and web technologies have evidently evolved at a rapid pace since the early 2000’s but — for lack of time and because everybody was very busy making IDA better every day — the web site has remained unchanged albeit for its textual content.
From today you will be able to check out the first phase of our web redesign plan. The brief here was to make the content more manageable, to refresh the look-and-feel, to integrate the blog within the web site and to redesign the top pages. Focusing on only these goals has allowed us to publish in a short amount of time but has of course left most of the content untouched and indeed even imported in bulk, as-is.
This is why you can expect other redeployment phases in the future and we will start working on (some of) them right away. Existing content must first be analysed and, in many cases, updated. Editorial decisions related to very old (some might say historical) content may also be taken. One thing we would also like to do is to reorganise some sections of the web site, bringing together content that is now scattered, sometimes buried deep inside the old information architecture model. This will make it easier to find specific items and to navigate the site. At the same time we will endeavour to present content in a more attractive, easy to read way.
As there is a lot of content, we will have to decide on what to prioritise. Ideas for future changes that immediately come to mind are:
- to develop and upgrade graphical design guidelines;
- to merge support resources in one section and to review how such content is presented;
- to add more visual elements to text that can sometimes be a little dry in nature;
- to show IDA in action, through regularly updated image galleries or short movies;
- to develop a more consistent publication approach across document types (web, PDF files, etc.);
- and, besides improving content and layout, to also make your customer experience better, with a simpler and more intuitive presentation of our products and license types.
This is by no means a definitive list and it’s likely we will have other ideas as time goes by. This is our first step in that direction and we hope you will already find it useful.
