01 / 05 · Public institution · Energy research2026

isor.is

The new website of Iceland GeoSurvey.

Overview

ÍSOR, Iceland GeoSurvey, is an independent state research institute for geothermal energy, geology, groundwater and the seabed, advising energy companies at home and abroad. It is Vefapp's largest project to date and the first public institution in the portfolio. The old site ran on , the English edition was a separate install, and staff could change little themselves. We built a new site from scratch on and : 396 pre-rendered pages in Icelandic and English, and a where ÍSOR staff write news, projects, services and the staff directory themselves. The institute's geological map viewer is hosted inside the site. It went live on isor.is on 4 September 2026.

Public institution · Energy research

The isor.is home page in dark mode — Dark mode

An article on isor.is with a photo — Article

The isor.is services overview with fourteen areas — Services, 14 areas

The borehole-logging service page with a contact person — Service page with a contact

The ÍSOR map viewer presented on the isor.is home page — The map viewer on the home page

The isor.is staff directory filtered by division — Staff, filtered by division

The high-temperature areas knowledge page with a map and table of contents — Geothermal knowledge

Research projects on isor.is with a status filter — Research projects

The English isor.is home page — The English edition

Search results on isor.is — Site-wide search

Problem

The old isor.is was a site with plugins to keep patched and a developer in the loop for changes. The English edition was a separate install on en.isor.is with fewer pages, and the URLs followed no rule. The organisation chart was an image. An institute that publishes research in two languages needs a site its staff can write themselves. A public-sector site also has to meet accessibility and privacy requirements, and the old links in reports and papers have to keep working.

Approach

with pre-rendered pages over , with on every table. Icelandic and English live side by side in one system with on every . The covers news, projects, services, staff, job openings, home-page slides and announcements, plus a media library, a newsletter and an inbox for enquiries. Signing in requires a code, and the database itself separates administrators from editors. We migrated the content with scripts: 92 articles, 14 services, 12 projects and 52 staff. We mapped 166 old URLs from both sites so they land where they should. The ÍSOR map viewer is bundled with and hosted inside the site, and a watcher checks every hour that the map servers still render.

Outcome

The domain switched on the scheduled day, 4 September 2026, and ÍSOR staff run the content themselves. Every page is built before a visitor asks for it and refreshes on its own when an editor saves. The old links work, the English edition matches the Icelandic one, and the monitoring reports a fault before a visitor does.

Map viewer

The ÍSOR map viewer (Kortasjá) is an interactive map of Iceland's geology, geothermal areas, groundwater, geophysics and seabed, with dozens of layers and separate land and ocean modes. ÍSOR's own GIS team writes it on Esri's . It used to fetch hundreds of small files from Esri's CDN on every visit. We take their files unchanged, bundle them with into one 378 KB file on every build, and host the viewer on isor.is together with the SDK's runtime assets. The data still streams from ÍSOR's map servers. The site's theme and language follow into the viewer, it runs under its own , and a watcher renders a map tile every hour to confirm the servers still answer.

Key features

01Bilingual for news, projects, services, staff and job openings
02Home-page slides with photo or video, and announcements that appear and expire on a schedule
03Media library with uploads and galleries, draft preview on the site itself
04Translate button on Opus 5: an English draft from the Icelandic, an editor reads and saves
05The ÍSOR map viewer hosted inside the site, bundled from the with
06News shared to Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn straight from the editor, chosen per article
07Newsletter with double opt-in and an enquiry inbox with a copy to ÍSOR's mailbox
08Hourly watcher: map servers, the statistics service, the mail domain and social tokens
09First-party analytics without cookies, aggregated in for the reports page
10Live figures from ÍSOR's measurement database on the home page: this year's borehole logs, metres and samples
11166 old URLs from isor.is and en.isor.is land where they should, a 404 monitor catches the rest
12Light and dark themes, and a pause control on the home-page slider

Editorial

01Icelandic and English side by side in one form, with drafts and publishing, and no deploy needed to save
02A body editor that stores plain text rather than , so nothing foreign reaches the page
03Home-page slides with photo or video and an optional display window, for an event say
04An announcement bar that switches itself on and off on schedule
05Media library: uploads, reuse and captioned galleries in news and projects
06Translate button: Opus 5 writes an English draft into the same fields, an editor reads and saves, never automatically
07Draft preview on the site itself before publishing
08A Ctrl+K command palette that jumps to every part of the admin

Security

01A code on every sign-in, checked again in every server action
02 on every table: the public reads published content only, drafts are never visible
03Administrator and editor roles separated in the database itself, not only in the interface
04Sign-ins expire after 24 hours and after ten idle minutes, sweeps stale sessions inside the auth database
05A enforced site-wide, with a wider variant for the map viewer alone
06Form rate limiting in , IP addresses stored only as salted hashes
07Personal data deleted automatically on the privacy policy's schedule: enquiries after 24 months, unsubscribes after 6
08A production build refuses to ship when required settings are missing
09Four-category cookie consent, data hosted in the EU

SEO & migration

01Old URLs mapped from a crawl of isor.is and en.isor.is: 166 URLs, 84 fixed rules and a database lookup for old article paths
02Bilingual sitemap with , RSS in both languages, robots and a canonical on every page
03 for the organisation, services, news as BlogPosting and breadcrumbs
04An OG image per page and a dedicated 4:5 JPEG card for Instagram
05 ping and search-engine verification codes editable in the admin
06A 404 monitor with one-click and 301/302 rules from the database, applied in middleware
07Visitors outside Iceland get English on their first visit, search engines see Icelandic as the primary edition
08The domain switch rehearsed in advance: a script replays around 200 against the site before and after the move

Operations & monitoring

01An hourly watcher has ÍSOR's map servers render a real map tile, not just return metadata
02The same watcher checks the statistics service, that the mail domain is still verified at , and that social tokens are valid
03One alert when something breaks, a daily reminder while it lasts, one when it recovers
0490 days of check history on the admin's monitoring page
05Unexpected server errors are reported automatically with a traceable digest
06First-party analytics without cookies or IP addresses, aggregated by a function
07The build fails if public pages stop being pre-rendered, and CI runs typecheck, ESLint, 23 test files and a build on every merge

Social & newsletter

01Sharing to Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn straight from the article editor, ticked per article
02Instagram gets its own 4:5 card with the article's photo, rendered on the server
03Every attempt is logged before it goes out, so a retry never duplicates a post
04Newsletter with double opt-in, signed unsubscribe links and a send history
05An enquiry inbox with status, a copy to ÍSOR's mailbox and a receipt to the sender
06All mail goes through from isor.is with a DKIM signature, so ÍSOR's mail stays out of spam

Performance & accessibility

01396 pages pre-rendered at build time and served from the CDN, refreshed automatically when an editor saves
02WebP images at the right size for each device, no layout shift
03The map viewer loads no code from Esri's CDN: one 378 KB file and modulepreload across the whole module graph
04Fonts hosted on the site itself, no calls to Google Fonts
05Keyboard-friendly menus, a skip-to-content link, visible focus rings and respect for reduced motion
06A pause control on the home-page slider ( 2.2.2) and a dedicated accessibility statement
07Light and dark themes that follow the device setting, inside the map viewer too