Revamping Coral Reef Conservation Program Website

NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program is a cross-NOAA program that focuses on resilience-based management of U.S. coral reef ecosystems and provides scientific data and information to coral reef managers, scientists, educators and the interested public. CSS employee owners recently played an integral role in updating the website with a fresh new look and reorganizing content to provide this information in a more user-friendly, easily accessible format.

The Coral Reef Conservation Program Communication Director — a role filled by a CSS employee owner — worked with web developers and data managers from NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management and National Centers for Environmental Information to provide input on content organization, design, and functionality. The focus areas of the program, such as management capacity, sustainable fisheries, restoring coral reefs, and monitoring coral reefs and communities, are now organized in a more intuitive location, with the topics listed on the main page menu. Additionally, as part of this build, the team developed Digital Corals, a portion of the new website where users can more easily access data, documents, projects and stories. This new section presents a more modern-looking user interface and provides seamless access whereas users previously had to jump to a different system that was less intuitive to navigate. This task was quite complex as the previous information portal contained more than 20 years of data and publications that were transferred to the new system. 

Visit the new Coral Reef Conservation Program to view the full experience.