Rebuilding the World Bank Open Data Portal

JING'AN, China - July 27, 2016 - PRLog -- Wiredcraft, a digital product agency in Shanghai and Berlin goo.gl/kDlxja, completed the rebuild and launch of the World Bank Open Data Portal on June 23rd, 2016. The rebuild emphasized mobile access and performance aiming to provide anyone and everyone access to the open data. As more and more of the world comes online via mobile devices, it became monumentally important that this new site be optimized for such devices.

Bringing in nearly half of their total web traffic, the Bank invested in improving the data platform's accessibility and functionality, making the data available to anyone who's interested, even if the user is visiting the site from a mobile phone in remote locations.

As the World Bank's announcement stated, "the new site is a major improvement in just about every way." Take a look at the site and you'll find that "graphs and maps get a major upgrade," the data has enhanced accessibility, and the site is much more user-friendly. As a major international hub the site supports many languages such as English, French, Spanish, Arabic, and Simplified Chinese.

The site was built with numerous state of the art software technologies including Falcor, an efficient data-fetching technology built by Netflix, which cut down network requests and improved data loading, and D3.js to build in-page data visualizations. The webapp is responsive to different sizes, which will be incredibly useful for the ongoing surge in mobile users. The site is a single page application seen here - https://wiredcraft.com/blog/code-splitting-single-page-app/ - that loads data quickly without reloading the whole page; traditional web pages will load a fresh page every time a user searches for new data. Wiredcraft utilized a code-splitting technique, so the page never actually reloads - it simply updates the data on the page, cutting down data requests by more than 50%. Once completed, the project was released in beta to the public to collect and act on feedback from actual users for 3 months. The final version of the site is available for use at data.worldbank.org.