Project Overview
I recently had the pleasure of joining the Novel Energy Materials Lab Group at Tulane University! I work as a Research Assistant in the lab, exploring MXenes and new ways to synthesize these exciting nanomaterials. I also operate as the Lab Group’s Technology Officer! As such, I have been tasked with redoing and maintaining the group website.
My first goal was familiarizing myself with the current website setup, structure, and design on Wix; this was my first experience with any type of design work, or with Wix, and I didn’t really know how it worked (or what I was doing 😅). I went through the entirety of the website’s media files including text data, images and posters, and PDF files to clean up and organize everything. Once all of the old material was neatly organized and easily accessible, it was time to jump in!
February
Members
The first major change I made to the website was redoing the ‘Members’ section. This was more involved than I had anticipated, as the members were contained in multiple different collections within the Content Management System. Realizing this was likely the case for other content on the site, I went through and reorganized the CMS like I did with the site’s media files. Finally, I could start with the redesign. Let me know what you think!
March
News
The lab group had not had a chance to update the website with recent events in a while. Since it is important to showcase the lab’s scientific innovation, and to share exciting news about the lab group and our members, my next objective was our ‘News’ section. I streamlined our news collections to make editing, ordering, and displaying our news content easy for anyone who wishes to do so, as it was previously all entered and organized manually, entry by entry. Here’s what the page looks like before/after!
Home
Once the two most time sensitive sections were updated, it was time to redo our home page. I wasn’t a fan of our home page, aesthetically, at least. What I did appreciate was that it was concise and contained our research motivation, central to the lab groups purpose and intentions. I decided that a fancy home page wasn’t necessary; I wanted to keep our research motivation at the forefront and add a little bit of visual insight into our lab group to keep readers engaged and interested in the group, hopefully encouraging them to explore the website more. I wrote a more concise version of the core values and goals of our lab group, added a welcome message, a gallery with some pictures of presentations given and awards won by the group, and a little ‘recent news’ tab to the home page. I think it is more inviting to the visitor and piques their interest in the lab group. Let me know what you think:
Future Plans
In general, I’d like to continue improving the overall aesthetic of the website. As I have been going along, I’ve been making sure my choice in styles, fonts, sizes, colors, etc. are consistent. once I finish updating the sections with priority, I will go through the entirety of the website to ensure consistency throughout. Otherwise, here is a brief overview of my intentions.
- Design Alternative News Page
- Obtain Publication Graphical Abstracts, Organize Publications Dataset
- Redo Publications Page
- Update Teaching Page
- Continue Unifying Site Theme, Spacing, etc.
- Clean Up Links, Image Alt Texts