Somewhere right now, a prospective graduate student is up late reading lab websites, deciding where to apply. A program officer is skimming your site the night before a review panel. A colleague at another university is checking whether your group would make a good collaborator. Your website is what they find. This guide is about making sure they find something good.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
We provide and maintain a public website for your research group. Our team handles the servers, the software updates, the security, and the backups. You handle the words and the pictures. You will never need to install anything, renew anything, or fix anything at 2am \u2014 that part is our job.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Your site runs on WordPress, the same software behind roughly forty percent of all websites. You do not need to know anything about it beyond what is in this guide.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Your site is the front door of your group, not the lab itself. It is not a place to store research data, run custom code or web applications, collect survey responses, or host course materials. If you need any of those things, ask us \u2014 we can point you to the right service.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
How your site works<\/strong> explains the moving parts in plain terms: getting started<\/a>, pages and posts<\/a>, themes<\/a>, plugins<\/a>, users<\/a>, images<\/a>, accessibility<\/a>, and writing for visitors<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The pages your site needs<\/strong> walks through the standard pages of a research group site, one by one: the homepage<\/a>, research<\/a>, people<\/a>, publications<\/a>, equipment<\/a>, the principal investigator’s page<\/a>, join us<\/a>, contact<\/a>, and news<\/a>. Your site starts with drafts of the core pages already in place, so you are filling in blanks, not staring at an empty screen.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n