CERT Website Relaunches with New Look and Features
• Article
February 6, 2014—The SEI has launched a new version of the CERT website. The site has been redesigned to improve the user experience, to better represent the key capabilities and current research functions of the SEI's CERT Division, and to enable one-click access to the site's most in-demand resources.
"We hope visitors to the site will appreciate the site's new information design, which we believe they'll find more engaging and straightforward," said Amanda Parente, team lead for the SEI's External Web Strategy and Design group. Parente added that specific attention was directed toward reorienting the site to align with specific customer needs.
The new site has been more than a year in the making and has involved the effort not only of SEI web developers and designers but also the SEI Technical Communications group and an array of contributors from the SEI CERT Division itself.
This work is part of a larger effort to revitalize, improve, and integrate all SEI web properties. The CERT website relaunch comes on the heels of the September 2013 launch of the SEI Digital Library, a resource developed to help researchers locate and access SEI publications more efficiently.
"The SEI Digital Library resides on an entirely new data management infrastructure," said Parente. "It provides users a number of enhanced search capabilities and provides support for media file types used in our video, audio, and webinar assets." Parente added that the SEI Digital Library centralizes digital assets and makes them available from all SEI-related sites.
"A cross-functional team at the SEI that included web designers, developers, content experts, and user experience strategists worked to get this website up and running," said Parente, noting that the relaunch entailed not only front-end enhancements, specifically an entirely new design and a revamped information architecture, but back-end improvements that include an updated infrastructure.
Future planned work will enhance the SEI website's usability and information architecture, and align its design with the newer SEI Digital Library and the CERT websites.