We are going to be kicking off some long-term projects to redesign EMBL’s web presence. Before we begin, it’s important to establish a clear understanding of what we mean by this. Are we talking about:

• A new website?
• The website?
• All of EMBL’s websites?

We are thinking of this work as 3 distinct projects:

1. EMBL’s main website (embl.org)
2. An intranet for EMBL
3. A website focussing on the scientific services that EMBL offers

Does this split make sense to you?

How we plan to work

We, in Strategy and Communications, have a clear interest in these projects. But we’re aware that that is true of everyone at EMBL, and many people beyond. So it’s important that we work with the entire EMBL community and the users of these websites. Here are some principles by which we want to work:

1. These projects should be consultative and collaborative
2. We should work on the basis of evidence (and not from, say, opinions or hunches)
3. We will work on these projects over the long term (we’re not going to ‘roll out’ or ‘launch’ and be done)
4. We need to work iteratively, making improvements as we go

Get involved

Our first principle is that we should be consultative and collaborative. So that means listening to you, giving you a chance to give input and feedback and learning from you.

One of the purposes of this blog is to make sure that we’re clear, open and transparent. Please keep checking here, and do please add comments on this blog.

There will also be plenty of more opportunities to get involved as we go along. We’ll be opening online surveys, conducting interviews, asking people to test stuff. You’ll find information about this popping up in various places, but also here on this blog.

Getting started

There are some big things we need to put in place before we get going, including a governance structure that will allow us to navigate difficult decisions, agree on priorities and principles as an organisation. But we feel it’s important to get going as we do this, and so we’ll shortly be announcing the first research ‘sprint’ for the intranet project. More information coming soon…