What does a good laboratory homepage look like? Show me at least one!
Posted by attilachordash on April 16, 2007
In life sciences the basic, functional unit of cooperation and research is a LAB.
Now am I alone with my opinion that most academic laboratory web pages simply do not meet any advanced, current, dynamic web standards, although this would be crucial for them?
What information should a good laboratory homepage offer, and what design would be desirable? What is the proper balance of design and functionality? Considering content: principal investigator and lab members, research interests, publications, available positions, contact infos, grants, methods, setup, tools, cooperative partners, awards, multimedia files, audios, videos, blogs, news, media coverages, interviews? In contrast, many lab pages say that they were last updated in 2004. Unthinkable. I got a one sentence theory on why many academic web pages suck today: scientists (dominantly physicists and mathematicians) were out of the first inhabitants of the word wide web, and most academic web pages were made by scientist-turned web geeks in the 1.0 era. But that era is clearly over, the 90’s has gone, and what we are seeing today is often not enough.
As I am more tempted to immerse in positive criticism, I link here 3 lab homepages in alphabetical order in my beloved stem cell and mitochondria field, which are quite good and I’d like to ask my readers which of them is the best and why? Also, I’d like to start a unofficial competition for the best laboratory web page on the Internets, so please readers, place your bets and suggest your nominees. List of the other nominees can be found at the end of the post.
Bernstein lab (look at the video)
Update: Readers also suggested the following ones:
Refinetti lab, University of South Carolina from Coturnix.
Jessell lab of Columbia Univ. from Alvin.
Redfield lab from Dr. Rosemary Redfield.“It’s not slick, but it’s open science. We post our grant proposals as soon as they’re submitted, and the page has links to our blogs about our research-in-progress.”
Gregory lab from Professor Ryan Gregory.
Kissinger’s lab from Nandita Mullapudi. “I like ours because it is fancy-free, clean and slick. It has links to websites that are research based as well as daily-use websites like the university system, etc, making it convenient for a homepage.“
Hui lab from Zachary Moore.
Laboratory of Tree Ring Research from Jim Swetnam, although it is more of a research institute than a distinct laboratory.
Purvis Lab at Imperial College, UK from Dave Hone.
Leander lab, Roger lab, Archibald lab, Waller lab, Patterson lab from Opisthokont.
Ramaswamy lab from Matt.
Rissler lab from Kathryn Perez.
Evans Group from suchire.
Zhang’s Lab of Molecular and Genomic Evolution from TR Gregory.
Stagljar Lab from Eva.
Ruthazer lab from Jeff.
Mullin’s lab from peretz.
Wolpert lab Cambridge University from Ah.
Duffy lab University of Connecticut from John.
Pielak lab at UNC Chapel Hill from Gary Pielak. Simplicity. Also saying where students end up.
John Plane’s lab in Leeds from JD.
Conklin lab from Natalie.
Wilkinson lab from Pierre based on the semantic web and RDF graphs. Not bench science but bioinformatics.
April 16, 2007 at 10:57 am
[...] the majority were designed by the first inhabitants of the web and asks us to prove him wrong by submitting the best laboratory web site to [...]
April 16, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Hi! I got directed here from Cortunix, but here’s a dev bio lab’s webbie. Cheers
http://sklad.cumc.columbia.edu/jessell/
April 16, 2007 at 1:10 pm
Thanks Alvin, post updated.
April 16, 2007 at 1:27 pm
Check out ours (www.zoology.ubc.ca/~redfield).
It’s not slick, but it’s open science. We post our grant proposals as soon as they’re submitted, and the page has links to our blogs about our research-in-progress.
April 16, 2007 at 2:30 pm
The University of Texas’ Southwestern Medical Center department of Molecular Genetics page is pretty good.
As is this lab page in the University of Cincinnati’s department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine, if I do say so myself.
April 16, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Thank you very much for the nominees, I try to keep them updated. Please also tell us why do you think these pages are good and functional and what special features they have. Zach: The University of Texas’ Southwestern Medical Center department of Molecular Genetics is not a lab.
April 16, 2007 at 5:46 pm
http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu
I would like to nominate the web page of the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research at the University of Arizona. See the link above
April 16, 2007 at 6:13 pm
The ‘Purvis Lab’ at Imperial College, London UK, has an excellent homepage. Lots of papaers, recent works, CVs, links and the rest.
http://www.bio.ic.ac.uk/evolve/
April 16, 2007 at 6:26 pm
I’m always a little weirded out when I come to a laboratories homepage that’s completely tricked out. It just seems like it would be a better use of time/money to be doing research. Just give me the basics so I can find what I need.
April 16, 2007 at 7:39 pm
Here are a few good laboratory homepages from my field of research:
http://www.botany.ubc.ca/bleander/home.html
http://rogerlab.biochemistryandmolecularbiology.dal.ca/
http://myweb.dal.ca/jmarchib/
http://www.botany.unimelb.edu.au/eukdiv/
http://www.bio.usyd.edu.au/Protsvil/
Good enough, perhaps?
April 16, 2007 at 7:55 pm
Perfect little collection Opisthokont, thanks. A commenter at Pharyngula called the problem discussed here “out-of-date webpage syndrome”.
April 16, 2007 at 11:18 pm
http://sil.biochem.uiowa.edu/
April 17, 2007 at 1:26 am
This is my favorite: Dr. Leslie Rissler at University of Alabama.
http://bama.ua.edu/%7Erissler/
April 17, 2007 at 5:17 am
http://daecr1.harvard.edu/ is definitely one of the top for chemistry.
April 17, 2007 at 6:07 pm
A nice page at http://www.umich.edu/~zhanglab/
April 19, 2007 at 1:52 am
I really like this one:
http://biochemistry.utoronto.ca/stagljar/index.html
It’s a lab in my department, but not my lab. Our own lab website is confined by hospital regulations that even prescribe which font to use, where the words go, and which words should or shouldn’t be bold. No room for creativity…
April 20, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Very interesting. I’ve posted about this on Nautilus at:
http://blogs.nature.com/nautilus/2007/04/what_a_good_laboratory_home_pa.html
Look forward to finding out who wins!
All best
Maxine.
April 21, 2007 at 5:55 pm
http://www.biodesign.org
April 22, 2007 at 5:29 pm
The only reason why most research websites suck is because most academics don’t know HTML, or the importance of HTML.
Here’s a cool one, not the best, but fun…
http://ruthazerlab.mcgill.ca/
April 23, 2007 at 1:42 am
I like this quirky one from the Dyche Mullin’s lab at UCSF:
http://mullinslab.ucsf.edu/
April 27, 2007 at 2:01 am
I recently discovered this one which I like - it has a blog and everything:
http://brembs.net/
http://bjoern.brembs.net/news.php
May 9, 2007 at 6:27 pm
Can I nominate Tulane Gene Therapy for “worst offender”?
I saw a mention of your name at NFTB and I thought it sounded familiar. You visited our lab back in March. How’s it been going?
May 9, 2007 at 8:06 pm
Hi Grady, thanks I ‘m fine, how about you? Well here we are seeking good laboratory web pages in the ocean of not too good lab pages so I do not think that seeking “worst offenders” is the best idea. Actually I was really amazed by the Virtual Tour of the Center for Gene Therapy at the Tulane site since it is informative, full of multimedia (nice motion pictures) and…personal. So virtual tours around labs are cool features.
May 17, 2007 at 6:24 am
This is a cute competition….
The best site by far that I have seen is of Dale Purves’ lab. It is esthetically presented, has all of the key information a surfer needs, is updated all of the time, and has a really good see for yourself section, which is a lot of fun.
The adress is: http://www.purveslab.net/main/
May 17, 2007 at 12:36 pm
I like to keep my site simple; my brother Chris designs it. I also believe in saying where students end up.
May 17, 2007 at 2:15 pm
John Plane’s Group in Leeds: Something plain and simple and in keeping with the university website rules!
http://www.chem.leeds.ac.uk/JMCP/
May 17, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Can anyone recommend an easy-to-use system for maintaining academic web sites? Some sort of template for a content-management system, for example? Ideally free software? Something that can be hosted on a lab computer and that has a non-HTML-interface for non-technies to update things easily?
May 17, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Mark Wilkinsson’s lab
http://bioinfo.icapture.ubc.ca/
it may looks austere but it is based on semantic web. A RDF graph (http://bioinfo.icapture.ubc.ca/labinfo/labinfo) is painted via graphviz , it can be used to quickly navigate to the information you are looking for and this data can be interpreted by a software.
Pierre
May 18, 2007 at 8:39 am
Natural Products Synthesis lab at the IPNA-CSIC (and any of its other labs):
Natural Products Synthesis lab
General menu is always present allowing direct access to any web section.
General contact info is always present at the bottom.
From a technical point of view:
- Most of the websites offer a plain e-mail address format instead of a tweaked one probably leading to massive spam attacks.
- CSS-based structure is preferred to tabular one.
- We are currently moving to a custom content manegement system.
Antonio
May 27, 2007 at 6:44 pm
Harlan, you could check out PublicationsList.org (I helped develop it).
Its not a complete solution for lab websites, but it gives a neat way to handle publications where the collective list is dynamically included in your site but each member just manages their own list on the server.
If your papers show up on PubMed you can also set up an email alert where you just cick to confirm whether a new paper should be added to the list.
Robert
August 21, 2007 at 7:28 pm
This isn’t terribly fancy, but this part of my lab’s website gives everyone passing through our lab a useful starting checklist on where to find lots of important daily use items. (Yup, I maintain it….)
October 10, 2007 at 9:55 am
[...] colleague, Attila, asked me months ago what are the components of a good laboratory website. However, my thoughts remained incomplete until I read David Crotty’s post at the CSHL blog [...]
November 21, 2007 at 3:55 pm
[...] was rather critical (screenshots). Quick reminder: The LaWVas awards is the one that grew out of my unofficial lab website competition idea. The winning sites as selected by the editorial team, judging panel and the readers will be [...]
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May 8, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Biased opinion perhaps, but definitely a fan of my colleagues’ site:
The Columbus Lab at UVA