The Research Project Template

I have had to make my fair share of research websites for different labs (for example cidia.ucsd.edu). There’s no point building a new site over and over again for different projects when there’s services like Google Sites that readily offer a free template and hosting.

The problem is, none of the templates on google sites were any good for organizing a research project. In my opinion —and this is totally subjective, a good research site should have the following characteristics:

Design Characteristics of a Good Research Project Website

1. Easy to find out whats important (such as announcements or due dates)
2. Easy to find files (centrally located)
3. Easy to coordinate group work (delegate tasks and monitor task progress)
4. Easy to edit (multiple users can contribute)
5. Easy to track changes (find out who’s deleting your stuff and beat them with a calculator)
6. Have a clean, modern, and simple appearance (so people use it)

Back in November, I created a site to organize the autism project at the Institute for Neural Computation, and decided that I didn’t want to have to do this over and over. So, I shared my work with the world and created a public template. I’m very excited to hear that someone has used it. I hope that it gets used and is enjoyed by flustered scientists around the globe!

https://sites.google.com/site/researchprojecttemplate