Enhancing the digital experience for Physics World readers

Digital content that meets the evolving needs of the global scientific community

We’ve been working together with Physics World for more than 5 years. Recently, through our Always Evolving® service, we have been working to maximise efficiency and work on website improvements at a steady pace, while continuing site maintenance each month.

Physics World represents a key part of IOP Publishing’s mission to communicate world-class research and innovation to the widest possible audience, and their website is part of their portfolio of information created for the global scientific community.

What the client wanted

• Maintaining a secure and stable website
• Accessibility improvements
• Refreshing main navigation and footer
• Digital magazine
• Live events feature
• GDPR compliance

Physics World partnered with us to elevate their digital presence through a range of website improvements and new features. From a streamlined navigation and accessible design to launching Physics World Live for online debates, we’ve enhanced user experience while ensuring site security and compliance.

With these updates, Physics World now provides an engaging, user-friendly platform that meets the evolving needs of its readers and community.

Refreshing main navigation and footer

We designed and developed a new header and footer to improve accessibility and visual appeal. The new header is simplified and mobile friendly. On mobile, there’s a sticky menu at the bottom of each page, which is positioned within thumb zones to make it easier to use.

The navigation is entirely accessible for screen readers and keyboard-only users, and more prominence has been given to Physics World Jobs and Physics World Live, as well as the search bar. We also created iconography for the list of key topics in the dropdown menu.

Following design and development, we ran specialist QA to test all the elements and use cases.

Launching a digital space for debates with Physics World Live

Physics World Live is a series of online panel debates where Physics World editors talk to leading scientists about hot topics in physics. In each of these hour-long events, online attendees can put questions to panellists in a live Q&A.

We produced a modern and fresh design for this section of the website, and gave the Physics World team full control over managing the content with:

• Various text fields
• Functionality to display sponsors for each of the events
• Different call-to-action options for registering interest versus registering for the event

Re-launching Physics World’s digital magazine

We helped Physics World launch their digital magazine. These easy-to-use digital editions include all the content that readers know and trust, available whenever and wherever they want it.

To make this digital content easy to navigate, we created a contents module that displays posts in a grid and links to articles around the site.

The digital magazine was relaunched as part of a wider strategy to improve digital experiences with Physics World, and we’re tracking and measuring interactions, following our results-driven approach.

Redesigning the FAQs page for better customer experience

We redesigned Physics World’s FAQs page with the goal of reducing the number of emails and contacts made to their customer service department. 

All relevant information is available on the page, ensuring more people with queries can self-serve and easily find the answer to their questions. The content is designed with headings for different topics, and accordions to reduce page length and help people find relevant sections.

The Physics World team also has the ability to showcase a video at the top of the page, giving them the opportunity to offer another format that some web visitors will prefer.

Rolling out a new Cookie banner for GDPR compliance

We rolled out a new Cookie banner to support Physics World with their legal and data compliance. This involved styling and implementing CookieYes with monthly scans to pick up any new cookies, and enabling Google Consent Mode.

Maintaining a secure and stable website with PHP upgrades

Updating the Physics World website from PHP 7.4 to 8.2 involved various changes to the codebase to bring its syntax in line with the latest standards in PHP. 

To accompany this piece of work, we updated WordPress and associated plugins to the latest versions, but it also involved bringing other non-PHP elements of the site up to date.  This included updating the various node packages used to compile the javascript elements of the site, in some cases sourcing modern alternatives to long abandoned packages to ensure continued functionality and security.

In addition, as part of the update, we took the opportunity to deprecate and replace things like the build system. This involved migrating away from using Gulp and instead using Laravel Mix to build styles and scripts upon deployment, replacing the inefficient and error prone deployment system with a custom built solution that worked seamlessly with the hosting setup. We also started to replace areas of the site’s custom CSS with TailwindCSS classes. 

Finally, we optimised the folder structure of the site to make it easier for our developers to work. This website now more closely matches the modern way we build sites today.