Delta has a new website. As always, independent journalistic articles are published here every day. The changes in design and layout make it easier to navigate.
The roof of the TU Delft Library, on which the Delta logo is inspired and projected. (Photo/editing: Marjolein van der Veldt)
Why did we need a new website? Was the old one that bad? The short answer to the second question is ‘yes’. Visitors were regularly confused and the Editorial Team was limited because of an overly rigid design. Furthermore, the support for the old content management system would stop. Budelinc, a design agency, designed the new website, gave the logo a new look, and opted for a wider range of colours. They helped us introduce a few major changes.
Dutch-English
To start with the language. While we have published almost all our articles in two languages for years, for the first time Delta now has a complete English language website as well as a Dutch one. So non-Dutch students and staff have the same full access to all articles, categories and dossiers as their Dutch speaking counterparts. You can hop between the two languages by clicking on the flag at the top right in the menu.
Dossiers
Student housing, campus development, climate, knowledge security, and IT & privacy. The new dossier page starts with these five themes. Readers can see what current issues are at play at TU Delft and it will be easier to follow the news in their own areas of interest. As current affairs arise, we will add new dossiers, temporarily turn off current ones and change the order.
Categories
At the top of the page (on laptop or desktop) or in the hamburger menu (on mobile) are the categories under which the different articles fall. We have added a couple more to the previous website. On top of the familiar ‘campus’, ‘education’, ‘science’ and ‘opinion’, these are ‘student life’ and ‘off campus’. We hope that this will help us arrange the articles more logically, which will help their findability in each area of interest.
Article layout
On this website, each type of article will have its own layout, be it a news item, a column or an investigative journalism story. The reader will then intuitively know what kind of publication it is.
We can add text and information boxes to articles so that the information can be divided into more digestible chunks. This gives readers the option of further delving into the subject or not.
The website also allows for photos and images to be presented in different ways, and to experiment with new types of visuals and infographics. We are not doing this only because they look good, but because they can tell the story in an appealing way. We hope that this will hold visitors’ attention longer and that they will retain the information longer.
Search function
The search function has been improved compared to the last website, and will be further worked on in 2024. We have not yet transferred/migrated all the old articles to the new website environment. It became clear that it was not easy to put an archive of 36,000 articles – the oldest dating from 1996 – into a new jacket. So the migration is being done in stages, starting with recent articles and moving back to older ones.
- Despite all the preparations, there will undoubtedly be irregularities that we have not spotted. If you see any, please let us know on delta@tudelft.nl.
Editor in chief
Saskia Bonger
Do you have a question or comment about this article?
s.m.bonger@tudelft.nl
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