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Bringing Your Research Lab’s Web Site into the 21st Century
By Trevor | November 9, 2007
I have been asked by enough people for advice on making their lab web site “better” for various reasons, so I decided to put together a list of things that will have a tremendous impact on a researcher’s ability to provide readers with the information they’re looking for, convey a professional effort in its appearance, and keep journalists, students, and others coming back regularly for updates. With that said, here are my top 5 tips for bringing your research lab’s web site into the 21st century:
1. Offer RSS feeds for your own papers or papers within your specific speciality. An RSS feed is a simple and effective way for anyone to keep updated with your work without constantly checking your web site. They are easily set up and maintained, and can be added to any type of web site, including your lab’s home on the web.
2. Make an XML sitemap and submit it to Google. If you don’t want your research (probably publicly funded) to be widely disseminated, why are you doing it in the first place? One of the best ways to help people find your site is to get it in the search engines. The best way to do that? Make an XML sitemap and submit it Google using their handy webmaster tools. They’ll then know where each of your site’s pages are, and will check them regularly for updates. That means your pages will appear more quickly in search results, meaning your research will be easily found, and more likely to be cited in other papers. See XML-Sitemaps.com for more information.
3. Provide PDF reprints of your latest papers. Let’s face it: not everyone has the luxury of an institutional subscription for access to hundreds of journals. Why not offer simple PDF reprints of your latest papers right from your site? This not only makes your work more widely available (and more likely to be cited), it also makes it dead simple for prospective graduate students, for instance, to see what you’re actually working on right now. (Of course, this tip would be negated if all of your work was available in open access journals, but that’s not very likely.)
4. Update the site regularly. This tip may seem simple, but most researchers are “too busy” to follow it. How many lab web sites have you been to with the latest paper shown is 2 or 3 years old, yet they have 10-15 papers published over the last couple years? I’ve seen dozens of sites just like this, and I’m hoping it’s not yours. Just taking the time and effort to keep your site reflective of your lab’s current work is a step in the right direction.
5. Take the web site seriously. A large majority of the lab web sites that I have seen in recent years are absolute jokes in terms of their utility. Students, journalists, fellow researchers — they would all be equally dissatisfied with the experience. We’re talking about the way in which hundreds of thousands of people will be able to judge your life’s work, and you put up a simple page with a generic research outline (probably outdated based on your current work) and a CV and call it good? This is not good enough for today’s researchers. In fact, it wasn’t good enough five years ago either.I have heard grumblings from some professors that go something like, “I’m too busy to constantly update my web site,” or “I don’t know enough about that technical stuff to do it right.” I’m sorry, but these excuses just don’t float when a simple job like this can be contracted for $500 or less — an amount you probably spend on pipette tips in a month. Remember, this is your contact point for telling the world about your life’s work. Isn’t that important enough to make a solid effort?Now maybe if you do your web site well enough, and people can clearly understand the relevance and importance of your work, you will also be nominated for 2007 Time Person of the Year, just like epigenetics and imprinting researcher Dr. Randy Jirtle was. (See Dr. Jirtle’s site, Geneimprint.org, for a site done right.)
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Topics: commentary, news links |
November 9th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
I wrote a tutorial on sitemaps a little while back. It’s more or less a log of what I learned while doing it, so hopefully it’s helpful.
November 9th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Thanks! That will be helpful for those that are interested in following up with some of these suggestions.
November 11th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
[...] Bringing Your Research Lab’s Web Site into the 21st Century (Epigenetics News): The post of the week! [...]
November 16th, 2007 at 3:25 am
[...] at Epigenetics News, Trevor touched on the importance of maintaining your lab’s website and provided some great [...]
November 21st, 2007 at 3:36 am
Nice collection of tips. There are of course a million others, besides creating a sitemap, that you might include in terms of the hidden aspects of a site that will help in making it more visible to search engines. I’d actually re-order those tips on a scale of importance as follows:
5 >> 4 > 1 > 3 > 2
Taking it seriously is by far the most important thing you can do, updating regularly gets you noticed by search engines (basically Google lurvs new content), RSS feeds are great, PDFs are good, but they’re generally static so alternative reprint methods with (chemical etc) meta data and other latent info would be better. Sitemap shouldn’t matter if you’re on an academic hub as SEs will spider your pages anyway providing you have good solid navigation.
db
November 23rd, 2007 at 4:25 am
[...] Bringing Your Research Lab’s Web Site into the 21st Century - Scientists often aren’t the best communicators, but promoting one’s scientific interests can help careers. [...]
November 23rd, 2007 at 2:34 pm
David,
Excellent points. I decided to provide the most specific suggestions first, while the last two suggestions are more general guidelines that should always be considered as part of the lab web site strategy.