Status Report on

IVOA Website Redesign

Jeremy McCormick

IVOA Northern Spring 2025 Interoperability Meeting

College Park, Maryland

Issues with Current Site

• Written in HTML
• Difficult to update by hand
• Hard to maintain consistent look and feel across site
• Verbose
• Not maintained using version control
• Outdated look and feel
• No mobile device support
• No search
• Old/outdated content (e.g., bad links)
• Difficult environment for contributors

Goals

• Implement new site in Hugo, initially maintaining the original content
• Pages written in markdown with site-wide stylesheets
• Provides consistent look and feel
• Better environment for authors → no need to author complete HTML pages from scratch
• Manage the site using version control
• GitHub with standard tools (PRs, reviews, issues, etc.)
• Deploy branch versions of the website so contributors can see their changes live
• CI to build and deploy the website
• Correct or remove outdated information
• e.g., remove links to application websites that no longer exist
• Provide a more accessible environment for contributors

Accomplishments

• Site fully ported to Hugo with new styling
• Cleaned up old and outdated information (primarily bad links)
• Hosted on GitHub with issue tracking
• Fully working GitHub CI for deploying prod and dev versions
• Mobile support
• Site-wide search
• Improved environment for contributors (markdown, make commands, CI deploys site preview, etc.)

New Look and Feel

Mobile Support

• Support for mobile devices added via Tailwind
• Welcome update since so many use mobile devices nowadays.

GitHub

• Site fully managed in a GitHub repo
• Old site HTML included in repo for reference
• Active issue tracking
• PR process for changes
• Working CI for deployment

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Newsletters

• All newsletters ported to new framework
• Look and feel was maintained, as well as graphical content
• Next newsletter is in the works!

Search

• Site-wide search capability provided with Pagefind
• Search index is automatically rebuilt in CI for every update

Plans

• Deploy the new site to production
• Additional UI improvements or redesign
• Edit site content for consistent and correct prose style
• Reorganize primary sections (“For Astronomers,” etc.)
• Revive newsletter (in the works!)
• Add additional content in the area of education and outreach
• Update and curate applications page

Communication & Contributions

• #ivoa-website-redesign and #ivoa-web channels on the IVOA Slack
• Please join if you are interested in contributing to the new site or just keeping up to date.
• GitHub issues
• Anyone may open an issue to report a bug, request a new feature, or ask a question.
• If you would like to contribute regularly to the website, then please request via Slack to be added to the Web Editors group in the IVOA organization.
• Please note that we strongly prefer that contributions are made on branches rather than forks, because our CI does not function properly with forks due to authentication issues.
• Refer to the contributing guide for instructions on how to contribute to the site

Acknowledgements

• Grégory Mantelet
• Marco Molinaro
• Klaas Kliffen
• Serhii Zautkin
• Deborah Baines

Questions or Comments

• What additional features should the site support, if any?
• Should the existing site content be reorganized?
• What additional useful content could be added?
• How can we encourage more IVOA members to contribute?
• …

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Test site: https://webtest.ivoa.info

Your feedback is very welcome!

Brainstorming

• IG info & summaries
• Mission statement
• Education & tutorials
• Copy/port stable content from the Wiki

• UI redesign
• News posts & feed
• ​

• Fix duplicate links (footer)
• ​

Content

Features/UI

Corrections/Bugs

UI Redesign Proposal

• Figma design

Web Hackathon

• Master List from web hackathon
• Unsure which of these issues have been fixed/addressed.
• At least some of the bad links (especially in applications index) have been fixed or removed.
• Plan to review this list and incorporate into content improvements.