By the time you read this, you will have likely noticed our new website. We carried out this work between May and October 2023 to address the somewhat outdated aesthetics of our previous website, to add new features and migrate from Drupal 9 to 10. In this blog post, we’ll take you through some of our new features and explain why we decided to give the SSI website a spruce-up. Our new website has transformed the way we present information, and its modern, polished look was designed to reflect the SSI’s world-leading status in research software.  

Over the years, we’ve advocated for and developed an understanding of the importance of research software, its developers and users, its requirements, and how software advances research in the UK. Our website is one of the key mechanisms through which we disseminate best practices, advocate for culture change in research software, and advertise our activities and opportunities. 

Since 2010, the SSI website has attracted over 2 million unique visits, and around 5,000 readers visit our blog every month. While our target audiences have remained relatively the same (though we keep reaching more and more researchers, research software engineers, and people interested and working in research software), the website has evolved with our focus to reflect the changes to and growth of our activities over the years. 

In 2018 we migrated our website to Drupal 8 and updated its look and feel. This time, however, we worked with The Union to achieve the goals of the SSI website strategy: increase accessibility, highlight successes, and direct users to our events, services, training, publications, guides and initiatives; for instance, our outputs, the SSI Fellowship Programme, Research Software Camps, Intermediate Research Software Skills courses, among many others.

New features

Making sure that the users of our website can access our information and find out about our activities is crucial to ensuring the delivery of the SSI. This is why our new website’s features focus on improving usability and accessibility for our users. Among some of the changes, we have added new pages where we collate our impact and outputs, making it easier for users to find out about our work. Furthermore, we now have four hubs that host our various types of resources: staff profiles, blog posts & news, training resources, and a hub with our guides, publications, reports, etc. 

Some of our blog posts are very popular and have often been referenced and cited in other articles or publications. Our new website allows us to assign DOIs via Zenodo to selected articles. This means there is a permanent record of specific articles which we want to deposit so others can easily cite us. As an example, see the “A-not-so-brief history of Research Software Engineers”.  

To make it easier to showcase our new features and how to use them, SSI Communications Officer, Denis Barclay, put together a video accessible on YouTube:

What’s next?

In the coming years, we’ll continue to maintain the website focusing on maintaining information up-to-date and accessible. We’ll work on further developing current features and potentially adding new ones that become essential to our users. 

In the meantime, please log any bugs or requests for new website features through this Github repository.