Informing, inspiring, and engaging society with EMBL’s research, services and training
Last week, the Digital team – together with a few people from Heidelberg IT – spent a couple of sunny days at EBI with our friends in Web Dev. The aim of this third retreat was to discuss and plan the EMBL.org roadmap and identify projects that would address three core areas: technical…
Growing an EMBL-EBI solution into a Visual Framework for the life sciences Building a website is easy. Building a good website is trickier. Building that good site quickly is hard. And if you want a beyond-hard challenge, also match your organisation’s look, feel and brand requirements.
Digital products are designed for use. Even simple, text-based websites are consumed by users with a task in mind. Mostly they want to find something specific. Sometimes they might want to get in touch with a real person to ask a specific question. Or apply for a job. ‘Just surfing…
Every month, for a few months, we’ve been sending an update to our department an update in a simple format: what we did last month, and what we’re planning to do next month. Of course, as the team grows, this makes for a longer update but we think the detail is important. It helps us…
A Content Hub for better content at EMBL Even organisations of modest size have web presences where content is hard to reuse and compromised editorial experiences. Even a robust CMS and internal development team is not enough.
Indulge me, if you will, with a lengthy zoological introduction. In the 1700s, the Swedish zoologist Carl Linnaeus devised a system for classifying all the organisms of the Earth. Each species received a unique name comprising two parts, following Latin grammatical construction. The mice in the…
We’re trying a new thing. Every month, I will be letting you know what we’ve done during that month, and what we’re planning next. We’ll also send out an email – let me know if you want to be added to the list. Why are we doing this? To keep you all up to date! […]
I’ve spent my first month at EMBL settling in, meeting talented people, and working out how the various digital projects that StratComm has planned will fit together. We have a whole host of digital objectives – revamping embl.org, improving the intranet, fixing Search, creating a unified…
Delivering digital products used to be about working in a ‘waterfall’ way: first gathering requirements, then writing lengthy technical specifications, drawing Gant charts, estimating delays and expense and so on. Maybe something would get released at some point. Maybe it would be good.…
In our communications for EMBL, we have traditionally highlighted what EMBL does: research, training, services and so on. As I have said before, what EMBL does in each of these areas is not unique in the life sciences. Efforts to describe what we do as unique will therefore rely on things that are…