The Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI) provides programs and workshops for researchers from educational establishments to national laboratories and government. They specialize in a combination of statistical sciences and applied mathematical sciences to tackle some of the most difficult scientific challenges.
Responsive Web Design
Mobile web browsing is quickly becoming one of the most commonly used ways for accessing websites today. It's what our industry refers to as "responsive web design" (RWD). RWD allows a website to repurpose the way it displays content based on the device a user is accessing it from.
While still satisfied with their website design, SAMSI needed to provide this feature to their web users and researchers. As the 2009 website was developed in Drupal, updating the templates and CSS was all that was needed to provide the improved functionality. Now users can get to the content, working groups and workshop schedules much easier then they were able to before with their mobile devices.
Initial Redesign 2009
The main goal of the website redesign launched in September of 2009, was to create a system that will allow SAMSI to track people who have attended workshops and programs, including name, address, institution, department, program attended, and what papers resulted from the programs. In addition, the ability to track demographics, including gender, ethnicity, was requested. Before the redesign, SAMSI had no centralized solution for tracking this information.
The primary goal of the website redesign was to provide a more attractive, intuitive public face of the SAMSI website. The existing website contains a wealth of information that is difficult to navigate. By deploying a Drupal content management system to enter and display content on the website, usability and accessibility of the website has greatly improved. The redesigned SAMSI website provides a user-friendly, accessible and attractive interface for browsing and searching content. Now, generating reports from the website's database to a variety of formats is easily accomplished by administrative users of the website.