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I am a Computational Biologist as part of an academic lab group working on the Immunogenomics of disease vectors (which may be relevant to the following).

I am designing part of a web-page that showcases the members of the group by:

  • Two portrait photographs
  • A personal statement (50 words)
  • Summary of their work (50 words)
  • Fun group photographs

Questions

  • What are the "Do"s and "Don't"s in designing a members page of a group such as ours?
  • Do you know of any exemplar members pages or group websites?

A template in wordpress so far: http://www.vigilab.org/

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    For each member: Name, one photo, link to personal web page. Let them do the rest.
    – JeffE
    Commented Mar 26, 2014 at 15:56

3 Answers 3

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All I know is what I want to see when I visit an academic's member page:

  1. Their name and a picture (to confirm it's them)
  2. Contact details
  3. Their rank and position
  4. How long they have been working in the group
  5. A full list of publications with links to full-texts and a good .bib entry
  6. A short bio / summary of work, including service and awards
  7. Some teaching information (if applicable)
  8. Supervision details (if applicable: whom they're supervising or they've supervised)
  9. Project information (which projects are they funded from/P.I. of, etc.)

Keep it professional, clean and brief.

You may want to list details like publications on a separate linked page if they are too long/cumbersome.

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    All that's really necessary is their name, complete list of publications (with links to free full text), contact info (phone, email, and physical mail), and a link to a complete CV.
    – JeffE
    Commented Mar 26, 2014 at 15:54
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    @JeffE: Indicating one's position is helpful, and a one-sentence summary of the projects one is involved with would also be beneficial. Not absolutely necessary, but definitely helpful.
    – aeismail
    Commented Mar 26, 2014 at 17:24
  • Agreed. A good, recent photograph is a must, available in a decent resolution - I'd say at least 800px vertically. Also, a full name, with full middle name(s) if any. If a name change ever occurred (marriage, etc.), it should be included too, even if just to allow me to look up someone's undergrad thesis/papers. Donald Ervin Knuth got it right: doing anything less makes life unnecessarily hard for people who do research.
    – Kuba hasn't forgotten Monica
    Commented Mar 28, 2014 at 0:51
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Designing a group web page is easy (and fun). Maintaining a group web page is hard and boring. As a consequence, most web pages (and parts of mine right now sadly) are old and out of date.

The only real solution is to keep as little information on this group page as possible, and decentralize most updates to the person whose information it actually is (and presumably who cares the most)

This is why @JeffE's statement is relevant. That information is mostly fixed, and points to where the real information is.

So unless you plan to maintain this page as a full time job (in addition to your other work), put as little information on it as is necessary. Having no web page is much better than having a web page with incomplete information and stale links.

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In terms of exemplar websites, I like the style of the Ketterson Lab group, who have very basic info on their site that includes a link out to the lab members' websites--where more up-to-date info is the responsibility of the lab members.

http://www.indiana.edu/~kettlab/people.html

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