This is a short report on the progress of building EASA’s new website. It uses the photos submitted by members and selected by the EASA exec committees. 

The colours and graphics in this report are modified versions of the design produced by Juhani Juurik, recreated as live web design and modified to meet the feedback from the EASA’s president of a lighter and more colourful mood.

The design also incorporates image content from EASA’s output and services such as the Journal or Conferences.

This is a design feature which allows for smaller, low-resolution images to be used, so that when it comes to imagery, we can maintain relevance as the deciding principle, rather than choosing either no image, which will leave us with a very monotonous website,  or high quality but irrelevant images.

The old website is comprised by pages with html code. Elements such as events, people and publications are listed in paragraphs and headings, with images manually coded into the pages. This is a laborious process which results in inconsistent formatting. The manual quality of this work causes content to become outdated, and updates can be slow, causing frustration among network convenors and others.

The new website treats content elements such as events, people and publications as separate posts with set fields for types of content. For example, all events are added separately and all have common fields for date, location and deadlines. People profiles are also separate posts, and have fields for EASA role, external links and other EASA involvement. This is not an automatic import job!

• Each post has its own url which can be promoted separately on social media
• Templates query posts into relevant pages, such as events by networks or people by committee.
• Quickly add content and data without spending time on formatting and linking – focusing on promoting the content
• Safe to involve other editors such as network convenors as the risk of inconsistent formatting and broken internal links are removed