• Reported by Scotty

The International Atomic Energy Agency, headquartered in Vienna, Austria, is the UN's nuclear energy organization. The Agency's work has been much in the news lately as the professionals with the IAEA work long, hard hours to harness nations' nuclear capabilities for the good of the world's citizens -- from energy to drinking water.

Behind the scenes, teams of IT and web professionals work equally hard and long hours ensuring that information regarding the Agency's programs is available to the public and internally for the important work at hand. Recently, I communicated with the site's web editor, Rodolfo Quevenco, regarding the massive redesign of the Agency's primary website, which utilizes web standards such as XHTML and CSS.

Who redesigned the site?

The restructuring and redesign effort was conducted by an in-house team within the Division of Public Information, which has editorial management responsibility for the site. The impetus came from an organizational initiative involving the Agency's publishing and IT divisions, with the hands-on design work centered in the web team. The team is composed of the same core group of people who actually maintain and update the site and generate content on a daily basis.

Who did the coding?

The web developers and designers in the team. The CSS code was also written by a member of the team. It is important to note that there was no CSS/XHTML guru on the team when the redesign project started, though some team members had gone to seminars and related events to learn more about it. We learned much more along the way, and much on our own time. The net was invaluable in fast-tracking our learning curve, particularly work already done by Doug Bowman of stopdesign.com, Eric Meyer, Dan Cederholm of simplebits.com, Jeffrey Zeldman of A List Apartand most importantly, Dan Shafer. whose book HTML Utopia, Designing Without Tables served almost as our "Bible" during the redesign. The work and the learning process continue.

What were your criteria for redesigning for web-standards?

In the site redesign, we were aiming for improving structure, navigation and usability of the site. We also wanted to "future-proof" the site by separating content from the design. Another goal was to maintain a common look and feel across all the sub-sites within the iaea.org domain. And we believed we could achieve all these goals through standards based web design using XHTML/CSS-P.

This was a call the team had to make after carefully weighing the pros and cons of standards-based design. The site has had three major redesign since it first went on line in 1995. Each one was a "painful" and time-consuming exercise. By adapting the standards-based approach, we hope to be able to take away the "pain" in the future site redesign efforts and make the process easier for everyone.

International organizations like the IAEA can play a role in promoting standards-based web publishing. We've tried to lead by example and hope that other UN organizations find value in the approach we have taken.

As for validation, that is still our ultimate goal. We have a huge site with a lot of branches. A lot of legacy pages still need to be reconverted and we are also addressing the issue that our current content management system does not generate XHTML compliant code.

Do you have any words for the webgraphics readers?

We appreciate any positive feedback from critical reviews of our site and code, as well as the comments we've received so far. We aim to support the web standards initiative as much as possible, and will keep working to improve the site further, and move nearer to the still elusive goal of standards-compliance.

There you have it!

The IAEA web redesign team were under no pressure to do anything special, but chose to do the "right thing" and implement their site's redesign using web standards. It's incremental steps like this that are pushing the momentum in the right direction. You may notice some common themes from previous articles and accounts of "fighting the good fight" and converting massive sites to standards-compliant markup. The web designers' arch enemy surfaces once again: the Content Management System from Hell.

As was discussed previously in webgraphics, perhaps some of the markup in the IAEA's site is not pure semantic and correct in that regard, and still a bit muddled in the presentation, but the Agency should be applauded for plunging into the deep waters in which the typical webgraphics reader is already treading. There's lots of room in the pool, and everybody gets better at swimming with practice.

Smart web developers, like the IAEA's in-house team, see the challenges of the future, and choose to meet them now. It's hard work, to be sure. But it's possible, and that's why we do it.

The members of the IAEA in-house web team are staff of the Agency's Division of Public Information. The standards-based approach was led by Rodolfo Quevenco and engaged Horace Agbogbe, Mikael Reventar and Sue Soliman.

Scott Partee reporting for webgraphics.