About This Site
Launch of New TIFR Webpage on Occasion of TIFR’s 75th Anniversary
30th October 2019
Dear members and friends of the TIFR community:
Today, as part of the TIFR's Founder’s Day Celebrations, we launch a renovated website. Here we make a few comments on what we’ve done, and why.
The site that we are replacing had a straightforward and minimalist aesthetic. The homepage linked to all important pages in one click and pages loaded quickly. In a world of low bandwidth this was good design.
But it was also time to make some changes.
First, we wanted to separate the 3 functions of the former TIFR website — a portal to all the TIFR Centers, as the homepage of the TIFR University, and the homepage of TIFR's main campus at Colaba. This was asking too much of a single website, and we have chosen to reserve www.tifr.res.in for the former two, and moved all Colaba-specific events, services, and announcements to a new site dedicated to the main campus: main.tifr.res.in.
Second, we wanted to have a vibrant celebration of the science at TIFR Mumbai and the people who do it, and the people behind the scenes. This is Campus News.
Third, we wanted to give clear actionable items to our audience that wishes to engage with us. This is the section we call Get Involved.
Fourth, we wanted to have an intuitive navigation — presenting information for the outsider — that required a renaming and reorganization of the links to various research areas. Also, several people expressed the age-related difficulty of maneuvering the cursor through multiple menu-levels, and our horizontal design addresses that issue.
Finally, we also wanted a clean, modern, minimalist look-and-feel — emblematic of the clarity and no-nonsense approach we take in our scientific work.
In all of this, we aimed for a site that would work well on mobile devices, be accessible, and remain as light on bandwidth as practical. Our testing suggests that we have met our design specifications.
Over the course of this journey, we received tremendous support from TIFR members. The TIFR Director provided unwavering support and confidence in the face of what looked like an impossible deadline. Center Directors, Deans, and Department Chairs collated crucial information for us on a short notice. Very importantly, many of you provided said information and gave innumerable suggestions that have made their way into the what you see today. There are many more people to thank, but it would be impossible to not thank Prof. Arnab Bhattacharya, Prof. Sanjay Chandrasekhar, Prof. Amol Dighe, Prof. Sourendu Gupta, Prof. Sushil Mujumdar, and Prof. Sreerup Raychaudhuri, who provided valuable insights at various stages. It is also a pleasure to thank Mr. Sumeru Hazra who designed the banner images, Ms. Bhavya Ramakrishnan of TIFR Archives who provided historical information, and Mr. Jatan Mehta and Ms. Nisha Yadav for content-writing. Finally, we take this opportunity thank all members of the TIFR Webpage Committee who oversaw this work, and to recognize the hard work of lead developer Mr. Siraj Momin, co-developer Mr. Nilesh Kulkarni, and technical supervisor Ms. Kausalya Srinivas.
We hope you’ll enjoy this new site. The framework we have developed is flexible, and we will continue to improve content and presentation, add features, and remove unnecessary clutter. We welcome your feedback — be it user experience accounts, feature requests, or bug reports.
Yours truly,
Basudeb Dasgupta and Jyotishman Dasgupta
Convener and Co-Convener, TIFR Website Committee
Credits
- Lead Developer: Siraj Momin
- Co-Developer: Nilesh Kulkarni
- Graphics: Sumeru Hazra
- Content: Jatan Mehta, Nisha Yadav
- Technical Supervisor: Kausalya Srinivas
TIFR Webpage Committee
- Dr. Basudeb Dasgupta - Convener
- Prof. Jyotishman Dasgupta - Co-Convener
- Prof. Roop Mallik
- Prof. Sushil A. Mujumdar
- Prof. Sanjay Chandrasekhar, HBCSE
- Dr. Amitava Bhattacharya
- Dr. N. Raja
- Prof. Subhabrata Majumdar
- Mr. Raju P. Ambekar
- Mr. Nilesh Kulkarni
- Mr. H. Raghavan, CCCF
- Ms. Kausalya Srinivas, CCCF - Secretary