It’s interesting, and humbling, regarding the attention — even clout — one receives when “NASA” and “WordPress” are used in the same sentence. See a search on Twitter for those two terms. But the persistence in using WordPress continues to pay off in terms of resource and budget management, overall maintenance time, Section 508 accessibility, and ease of use by clients with any knowledge of HTML. I expound upon the benefits here at the GRC Wordpress site.

However, another caveat I discover is that the sites I maintain at NASA using WordPress get ranked well in the search engine pages, sometimes even compared to other NASA sites with similar focus, even in NASA’s own search engine.

Here are a couple search examples, concerning recent public announcements:

• Researcher Kim de Groh’s recent induction into the 2009 Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame
  • Google search
  • NASA search
• A NASA team winning an award from the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer
  • Google search
  • NASA search

At the time of writing, in Google, the NASA Glenn Research & Technology Directorate web site was the only NASA site to appear in the top 10 search engine result page, while in the NASA Search engine, the results were #1.

Though the search engine results will change with time, and though this is a rather unscientific search study, the search results do highlight a more accurate generalization that the Directorate’s activities are effectively being made more widely available, very quickly.

My work on the ICNS conference continues in the communications and publications for 2009. This poster was designed to reflect the netcentric integration among the communications, navigation and surveilliance elements that occur during an aircraft’s full travel path, from take-off to landing. Accompanying this design was an update to the ICNS Conference website graphic theme.

Recent new work on the ICNS Conference led to Publications Chair responsibilities creating the 2008 ICNS Conference poster (pictured above) and the new ICNS Conference web site. Said conference was originally a NASA-organized event, but since 2007, has become co-sponsored by the IEEE AESS and AIAA DATC. My work on the conference continues in the communications and publications area.

Overview

1. Launch of new ICNS Conference web site, enabling Wordpress as a content management system (CMS) with features to allow group editing based on role management , built-in search engine optimization (SEO) functionality, event calendar database, image management, and other dynamic features.
2. Creation of ICNS Conference poster to convey 2008 theme, “Information Takes Flight,” to contain transmission of digital data across multiple objects in airspace, updated color scheme, and historical design consistency.

With our years of experience dealing with the life cycle of NASA GRC websites, we’ll be keeping an eye on best practices for the average NASA GRC user to dynamically update and manage local Center websites, while keeping another eye on the forthcoming NASA public-face redesign that is scheduled to be implemented on November 30, 2007.

If our eyes become crossed as a result, we’ll likely rely on our third eye to help wade through the morass of information.