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Here is what I would call a particularly informative and clear professor webpage.

Of course, it's not the most important thing (for me, personally, I mostly discovered professors through asking current professors whom to contact). But a lot of PhD students do discover professors to contact through Internet searches, which may be especially relevant for PhD students who might not have as many connections (especially international ones). And maybe a strong professor webpage could also increase the "fit" of the applicants who do decide to contact the professor.

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  • What do you mean by "strong professor webpage"? What is a "strong webpage"? You mean a cool style? A lot of information?
    – user102
    Commented Mar 4, 2012 at 16:53
  • Hm, a lot of information, or good web design. I'll have to admit that "strong" is subjective, but the webpage I linked is unambiguously strong.
    – InquilineKea
    Commented Mar 4, 2012 at 16:57
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    Hum, no it's not. I mean, the design is not particularly impressive (not that I would do better myself, but this is better. And pretty much anybody can have something that looks nice with a PHP/CSS template nowadays). As for the information, I don't see how there is particularly a lot on this webpage. Actually, it seems like a pretty standard academic webpage to me. So, please be more accurate in your question (i.e. define strong).
    – user102
    Commented Mar 4, 2012 at 17:09
  • Hmm. I'm not sure how your linked webpage can be called "strong" either (how would you define "strong" there?). As for the one I linked, atmos.washington.edu/~dargan/research.html contains individual pages for all of his research subareas (if you click the hyperlinks).
    – InquilineKea
    Commented Mar 4, 2012 at 18:36
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    I never said it was strong ... I just said that the design was better, or at least more modern. That's exactly my point, I'm not saying your question is bad, I'm saying the use of the word strong is not good here. You could use "informative and clear" instead.
    – user102
    Commented Mar 4, 2012 at 19:06

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As an international student who is (was?) looking for potential advisors, I'd say yes (As far as I know)!

The algorithm for me worked as follows:

  1. Contact the obvious ones. These were authors of papers I read recently (& liked), editors of journals etc. Basically, the ones with good "academic presence".
  2. Look at professors who have written textbooks or survey papers.
  3. Look at strong departments for professors. (By strong I mean : Reputation, Rankings and Star Power/Infrastructure)
  4. If a professor has a good webpage (Updated recently with list of current/past projects, list of graduate students and alumni), Shoof! Time saved!
  5. If a professor has a bad webpage (Last updated in 2001 or with minimal content or whatever), then run him on google scholar. Read his papers and try to find out what his students are upto.
  6. Once a professor has been selected, run youtube and ratemyprofessor on him. This is usually worthless but it did yield some awesome results once in a while. It did help get a virtual lab tour at times.

In conclusion:

  • Maintaining a good website does help students (especially international) get to know the professor better.
  • It does save us a lot of time by having access to all relevant information at one place
  • What is most irritating is webpages with very old content. I would prefer limited recent content to old obsolete content.
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    ratemyprofessor is worthless because the data is biased.
    – Joel DeWitt
    Commented Oct 29, 2015 at 17:18
  • ratemyprofessor has known biases (against women, ESL profs) and focuses on undergrads. But it can highlight red flags. There are professors who cannot string words together in a coherent sentence, who scream at undergrads, or who assign problems that don't have solutions without warning. In my experience, these teaching problems correlate pretty well with bad advisors.
    – AJK
    Commented Feb 2, 2017 at 7:33

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