| Abstract: |
The BaBar collaboration comprises 600 physicists and
engineers from 85 different institutions in 11 different countries, all of whom have free
write-access to the BaBar web. The 50,000 page website was completely redesigned in early
1999 after a six month period of R&D in which various web management tools running
under Microsoft Windows were tested and abandoned until it was decided to create our own
toolkit using Perl and Tcl/Tk on a Unix platform. User views of the information
space were collated using a graphical tool which allows users to arrange subject cards and
their relations as they see fit. These views were combined with the results of analyses of
similar websites and of hit statistics within the old website to come up with a
well-balanced design. A prototype version of the new website was released to the
collaboration in January 1999 and an intensive period of debugging and improvement was
carried out, based on user feedback, before the final version replaced the old website a
month later.
The new website is arranged in a hierarchical tree-structure with five main general
areas branching out to more specific topics. Each page is "wrapped" with
navigation bars containing links to related pages; a sitemap, and to search pages which
make use of the structured design. The WebMaster enforces authorship guidelines and
provides page authors with template pages and tools to check pages for broken links and
invalid HTML. |
