The conversion was done by Nemein consultant Henri Kaukola. The old site had been powered by the NemeinNavBar system. Conversion to MidCOM was handled using my nnb2midcom.php script. MidCOM offered several advantages to the old setup:

• Clean, file-like URLs
• "Edit this page" integrated authoring tool
• Availability of different components, or site features
• Easily configurable metadata fields for content
  

As the site was going to be upgraded anyway, we took the opportunity to convert Helia's layout to table-free XHTML and CSS. This reduced the size of the site front page from 16,88KB to 9,37KB, a 45% saving. Approximately same saving should apply to all pages on the site.

The new layout should help with page download times, server load and scaling the site down to mobile devices and screen readers.