the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics

http://www.ictp.it — home > about the ICTP Website

About the new ICTP Website

During spring and summer 2004: development and test phases

All ICTP staff, scientists and visitors have been invited to browse all pages of this new ICTP Website during its development and test phases and to provide their feedbacks. The status of the development and validation process of all the pages has been always visible in the site map. Explanations of some features and implementation strategies have been provided by the WebTeam, during a seminar in May 2004:

Important notice for browsing!

Macintosh users should please note that using the browser Internet Explorer 5 may result in a poor experience, due to some problems related to that browser (IE 5 for Mac is now discontinued and unsupported by Microsoft); the best browsing experience may be achieved using Safari, Mozilla (MacOSX) or Netscape 7 (both MacOSX and OS9). On GNU/Linux, the recommended browsers are either Netscape 7 or the latest version of Mozilla, and on Windows both Mozilla and IE 6 may be used satisfactory. Anyway, if you don't care about graphic appearence and advanced features of browsing experience (like dynamical menus, page customization and text resizing, etc.), all browsers are able to access the full information contents of the website, including text-only browsers (i.e. lynx, from the unix terminal) or very old ones. The website has been tested also with mobile devices like smartphones and PDAs and it works reasonably well.

Overview

The old ICTP Website (with the URL: http://www.ictp.trieste.it, now moved to www.ictp.it) has been running since March 1994 using rather obsolete technologies and design, therefore it needed to be updated.

ICTP Home Page: 1997 - 2000

ICTP Home Page: 2000 - 2004

Early 2004, Prof. Katepalli R. Sreenivasan proposed to have a newly designed ICTP website aiming to satisfy ICTP needs of presenting a modern and appealing image to the world ready for the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the Centre.

For this purpose, ICTP consultants C. Fonda, M. Zennaro and E. Canessa were invited to seek for an effective approach based on their experience on Web technologies, and to check the feasibility of re-designing the ICTP website in-house in a short period of time, keeping in mind the ICTP scientific structure and organization.

The ICTP Website Model (pdf)

The suggested approach was simple, open, flexible, reliable and ready for fast deployment, because all of its components had these characteristics:

It presents a decentralized architecture that offers space and freedom for creativity following the scientific philosophy.

The plan was to develop the new ICTP website using open source state-of-the-art technologies and web standards certified by the WWW Consortium (W3C).

The proposed new ICTP Website has the following structure: A core part called "header" and a few "satellite sub-sites" providing in-depth information.

The core part, called header:
It provides the top level structure of the whole ICTP public website, with general information about the Centre and its activities, research groups and services. This header was based on static pages written in XHTML (transitional 1.0) for the content (markup) and relay on CSS1 (with some functions of CSS2) for the graphical appearance (look-and-feel). Its strict separation of structure (pages and menus tree), content (textual information) and appearance (graphical layout) facilitates the conformity to accessibility rules, providing an attractive appearance and a uniform "ICTP look-and-feel" to visitors with modern browsers but at the same time giving full access to the information by using any browser, even at low bandwidth, including the special browsers for impaired people and some web-capable mobile devices. This will be obtained in strict accordance with the W3C standards, without duplication of the structure (i.e., no "double versions" or "text-only version" of the pages) and avoiding complex scripting and any use of proprietary/closed technologies. This header is fully searchable by external search engines and provides also an internal search facility that extends, up to a certain level, inside the sub-sites too.
Satellite "sub-sites"
When available, they provide in-depth information about the different research groups and their activities and news, as well as access to administrative services and facilities. The sub-sites are based on pages dynamically generated (HTML and XHTML-Extensible HyperText Markup Language, CSS-Cascading Style Sheets) by web applications like open source content managements systems (CMSs) and web portal engines (based on MySQL, php or other languages), customized to have a look-and-feel similar to the one of the header. Such sub-sites may not have the same accessibility features of the header, sometimes requiring modern browsers for the full access to the information (this is due to limitations of the actual technology of CMS and portals, and may be reduced or eliminated in the future). These sub-sites should meet the needs of the different ICTP groups and administrative offices or services.

Optimization of Resources

Use of available External Web Services based on database technologies already implemented at ICTP (like the Library, the Agenda of SMR Activities, the SIS, etc.), have been linked to the header and not modified or adapted at this first stage. In the future, their appearance may eventually be slightly modified by their managers to look more similar to the new ICTP main Website.

Summary

The model used is essentially based on a two-layer structure to consider the different needs of ICTP groups/offices/services and the user-friendliness, especially at the administrator(s) levels. The header consists of rather static information that will not change over a relatively long period of time (e.g., head of groups, personnel, programmes, and so on) but which can certainly be modified as needs arises. On the other hand, the second level aims to include the dynamical part of the information and services which constantly varies (e.g., seminar announcements, news, forums, etc.) The top level will be such that contents and appearance are separated in order to facilitate any further developments/improvements with little effort. Global changes in the appearance of the header can be incorporated by simply adapting a few files without touching the contents. Eventually this header could be incorporated into a CMS, perhaps in a future project if time and ICTP resources allow it. Technologies like RSS (Rich Site Summary) to handle decentralized news feeds into the main pages can also be included. Another added value of this approach is the possibility to create specific communities within the different sub-sites Web Portals with the participation of scientists beyond the boundaries of ICTP.

The proposed approach has been motivated by the reference book Designing with Web Standards by J. Zeldman, considered a guide for future trends in Web designing.

Participation by all at ICTP and others

This model was openly presented and discussed during several open seminars at ICTP, with participants from different groups and responsibilities. The goal was to facilitate at each step the participation and interaction among those interested to collaborate with the project for a new ICTP Website. During the working progress, an open WebLog was available for comments and suggestions that proved to be useful.

Suggestions were also received from Emmanuele Bugatto, Fabio Carniello, Pierdavide Coïsson, Massimo Silvano and Mario Tiberio (graphic and web designers and photographers).

The new logo

Choosing a new institutional logo was not easy, and it was helpful to get opinions about some prototypes. When occasionally some of them were tried on some people already, reactions ranged from "it is not bad" to "can't we do better?" Keeping in mind that the logo needed to be simple, printable in different sizes as well as black and white or colour without losing details with some easily recognized meaning (if possible), after some large debate the choice was that given in the figure on the right.

The essence of this logo may be regarded as the imprint that ICTP has made on the world at large.

Technical information about the Website

You may find it interesting to have a look at some documentation and templates regarding this new Website.

How to get help via e-mail

If you need help regarding the website you can contact the webmaster via e-mail at the following address: pub_off@ictp.it (Publications Office)

ICTP e-mail addresses

e-mail addresses displayed on the Website are, in principle, unintelligible to web-bots (besides the anti spam filter facility available to ICTP computer users). However, there is not a perfect solution to the problem of spam either using cgi-bin forms or to hidden the e-mail addresses to automated programs.
At ICTP, it was decided to use the latter solution following standards and guidelines of accessibility.
All e-mails on the new Website have been encoded (as can be seen by looking at the HTML source of the corresponding pages).

Cookies

A cookie is a text-only string of information that a website transfers to the cookie folder of the browser on your computer's hard disk so that the website can remember who you are. We currently set 2 persistent cookies to manage the color you choose (light blue or dark blue, for higher contrast) and the size of the fonts (small, medium or large), and the settings are shared among different servers (this means that you have to set your preference only once and it will work for each of www.ictp.it, news.ictp.it, etc.). No personal or identifying information is held in these cookies. You have the ability to accept or decline cookies by modifying the settings in your browser. However, you may not be able to use all the features of our site if cookies are disabled.

Website Statistics

A summary of the ICTP website usage with some statistics is available and updated every night at 4:00 GMT.

Statistics are also available for the News and Events websites.