The new website replaces a previous Drupal-powered site that had not been updated in some time. This redesign accomplishes several goals, including making the site easier for CIS staff and fellows to maintain; giving CIS staff more editorial control over what’s featured on the site; and making the site more attractive and navigable for users. The new site, built on Drupal 7, provides extensive cross-referencing so that the relationships between different types of content — such as blog posts, experts, court cases, publications and events — are prominent and easy to traverse.

Completely overhauling the design, information architecture and administration to create a better experience for both users and site contributors posed challenges with regard to preserving years of accumulated content. We resolved these issues by developing custom content migration tools to programmatically import text and assets needed from the old site to the new, keeping over 10 years of blog posts at their original URLs.

The new site also makes use of advanced CSS techniques — such as gradients, transitions, and animations — to create a rich user experience while keeping assets such as scripts and images to a minimum.