The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology (2024)

MacDiarmid Institute (2024)

Website: macdiarmid.ac.nz

Size: 800+ pages

Government status: Centre of Research Excellence (CoRE)

My professional status: independent web designer/developer

Website client: The MacDiarmid Institute

Dates: October 2023 - present

Categories: Client liaison, IA & UX, Content-loader, Responsive web design/dev, e-govt/WCAG compliance, SilverStripe, Government websites, Large sites

Brief: The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology is one of New Zealand's oldest Centres of Research Excellence (CoREs). These are inter-institutional research networks, with researchers working together on commonly agreed work programmes.

The MacDiarmid Institute brings together almost 100 research investigators along with graduate and PhD students from seven institutions across Aotearoa. Their research focus is materials science and new technology, especially the unexplored territory where chemistry, physics, biology and engineering meet. Researchers collaborate to bring innovations to the marketplace where they can help address the big problems of our time and contribute to the New Zealand economy. The Institute's ultimate aim is to help the transition to a more sustainable way of life.

WebWeaver designed and built a new website for the MacDiarmid Institute in 2018-2019, and have remained as their web tech experts since then. We've done regular updates and additions to the website, and continue to support the MacDiarmid web team as required.

In October 2023 their current web editor left, and I offered to replace her. I work as a casual contractor, generally between 10 and 15 hours per month.

Achievements:

  • Recently created the HTML version of the Institute's 2023 Annual Report – 52 pages in a little over 70 hours including image editing and testing, with the freedom to decide on my own page layouts and image treatments to suit the web environment
  • Identified a number of typos and text errors in the Annual Report which I was able to feed back to the MacDiarmid team so that the print version (PDF) could be fixed
  • Making ongoing improvements to the work done by the previous web editor, who wasn't very technically skilled - within tight budgetary constraints
  • Making ongoing suggestions for website improvements to the MacDiarmid comms team – some of which I can achieve as their web editor, others of which I do as "WebWeaver" with the help of my developer.

My responsibilities included:

  • Editing existing and creating new pages across the website, as requested by the MacDiarmid comms team, and ensuring that these pages are user-focused and well formatted
  • Making suggestions for improved formatting, layouts and UX, adhering to best practice UX and e-govt compliance and accessibility guidelines
  • Tidying up some existing pages created by the previous web editor
  • Responsive testing and QA of all new pages.

Macdiarmid Institute website responsive screens in various devices

I was super-proud of the work we did to get the MacDiarmid website completed and launched in 2019. It was a huge effort from a very well organised team.

I'm pleased that we've remained connected by staying on as their web tech experts. So when the job of web editor came vacant, I jumped in with great enthusiasm. It's great to be able to maintain the quality of content formatting that we delivered on launch date, and to tidy up a few bits and pieces which could be improved. I've particularly enjoyed the big block of work which is the Annual Report - especially as I was given the freedom to build and format each page so that it looked its best in a web environment - rather than having to stick to the printed version's formatting.