A few weeks ago, the US National Nanotechnology Initiative website – www.nano.gov – underwent a much-needed facelift.  The NNI’s web portal was creaky when I was part of the Initiative several years ago now.  And it’s somewhat ironic that the world’s leading interagency initiative on one of the most prominent cutting edge technology platforms has relied on a website that is the antithesis of technology innovation for over a decade.  So I was pleasantly surprise to see the other week that the site has been updated, streamlined, and made more accessible, attractive, and – dare I say – useful.

The update has been in the works for a while now – I was one of a number of people asked about the old site and what improvements could be made well over 12 months ago.  Fortunately, despite the slow pace of progress, it looks like the changes have been worth waiting for.

Glancing around the new and improved site, the designers and NNI have done a good job.  Useful information on nanotechnology and the initiative is now far easier to find.  Information on stuff like current funding opportunities and recent reports is now clearly accessible from the home page.  It’s a cinch to find out more information about the Initiative and its member agencies.  Heck, you can even follow the NNI on Twitter now!

I particularly appreciate the new search page for NNI publications and resources.  If you are looking for specific resources from 2008 onwards, it’s easy to pull them out using the search interface.  The downside is that if you want anything before 2008, things are a little trickier – the search date fields don’t allow you to easily enter dates before January 1 2008 (although bizarrely you can search for stuff published between 2012 – 2014 – maybe time travel is a little-touted side-project of the NNI!).  Fortunately, you can enter earlier dates manually though – although you can’t see what you are typing.  Using this workaround, I managed to pull up some of the pre-2000 NNI documents, although I did notice that some of the early Interagency Working Group on Nanotechnology documents (the precursor of the NNI) were missing.

I’m not sure how much substantive new content has been added to the site with the update – although clearly there is some.  But at least in style and accessibility, the NNI now have a web portal that is commensurate with the technology it promotes.

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For nano-geeks, this is what the NNI website looked like on November 12 2010:

(You can access the archive by clicking on the image, but it will take a while to load).

And this is what it looked like on April 7 2000 (the earliest archived copy I could find):

Admittedly, the 2010 version was rather slicker that the 2000 version.  The basic design that has just been superseded dates back to 2004.