The Ensembl web site has provided access to genomic information for almost 10 years. During this time the amount of data available through Ensembl has grown dramatically. At the same time, the World Wide Web itself has become a dramatically more important component of the scientific workflow and the way that scientists share and access data and scientific information. Since 2000, the Ensembl web interface has had three major updates and numerous smaller updates. These have largely been in response to expanding data types and valuable representations of existing data types. In 2007 it was realised that a radical new approach would be required in order to serve the projects future requirements, and development therefore focused on identifying suitable web technologies for implementation in the 2008 site redesign.