Purpose
The Web Team is responsible for creating web-based content and applications to disseminate IRIS educational materials, community information, data products and services to our global audiences. The group is standardizing the user experience across IRIS websites and improving page response times.
Overview
The Web Team section of IRIS (both the DMC and HQ) is composed of webmasters, web application developers, content creators, and technical architects. They are responsible for maintaining the system architecture of the web systems both in Seattle and Washington DC, and all the server and client-side web-based applications that provide information to the community.
Primary Tasks
The Web Team is currently engaged in the following activities:
- Migration from bare-metal servers to virtualized machines (VMs)
- Reworking all static content into data-driven content. At each site this consists of:
- DMC: Conversion to Python-Django
- HQ: Conversion to PHP Code Igniter/Expression Engine
- Increasing engagement with web-based content, improving visitor traffic and user experience
- Creating compelling content that is both shared and drives traffic between the DMC and HQ websites.
- Standardize on front-end layout frameworks (currently Twitter Bootstrap) for a consistent user experience across IRIS websites.
- Improving page rendering speeds by using caching, shared layout content, and content delivery networks.
- Build web-based tools and visualizations to better disseminate information to our users and community.
- Use industry standard practices for sustainable development (ticketing systems, DRY code, Scrums, Code Sprints, regular meetings, code reviews, etc).
