When I first started thinking about applying for an NSF grant to create the Insect Genetic Technologies Research Coordination Network, I knew that the website would be an important element of the network, but soon after beginning work with the folks at Academic Web Pages, I came to realize that the website was in fact the key component to the success of the network.
A newcomer to social networking AWP introduced me to the concepts of curating and sharing content. Now with over 700 participants, the response to the site has been great. I am very excited about the network’s role in advancing technologies for genetic modification of insects. I am grateful to Academic Web Pages for their tremendous effort in making the website and the network a success.
I can strongly recommend Academic Web Pages to my academic colleagues, both for their profile pages and for websites for large research centers. Academic Web Pages was responsive to my needs and has produced several great websites for me!
My institution does not provide website support for individual PIs, so many of the faculty have only a barebones faculty webpage. This minimalist approach is neither eye-catching nor appealing, and it represents a tremendous missed opportunity for recruiting new students and demonstrating credibility to reviewers and program officers.
I have tried several times during the course of my pre-tenure career to develop a website for my research group, with the goal of creating a showcase for our research, accomplishments, and facilities. Even with downloading templates from the Web, I spent hundreds of hours (that could have been more productively spent writing papers and proposals) trying to figure out how to make a nice-looking website and made absolutely zero progress.
This spring I decided to to hire a professional website design company to create a website for my research group. Academic Web Pages was far and away the company that produced the most websites that were attractive, eye-catching, informative, and yet still retained clean and uncluttered functionality.
I had the pleasure of working with Sarah Boyd, and she did a tremendous job working with me through all of the stages of the development. Being a scientist, I am quite compulsive by nature, and this was especially true for what I wanted for my website. Sarah was the consummate professional in all of our interactions. She was accommodating of my revision requests and my busy schedule.
All of my colleagues are envious of my attractive new research group website, and more than one of them have contracted Academic Web Pages to create websites for their own research groups. I urge all pre-tenure faculty to do this as early in their independent careers as possible – the payoff is tremendous, and it is worth every penny!
When I started with AWP, I had a clear idea of how I wanted my website to feel. But it was hard for me to put it into words, and harder still to express it in the language of website terminology. As the collaboration with AWP developed, they helped me make my vision more concrete, teaching me along the way what would and wouldn’t work given the practicalities of website design. This ranged from the use of visual imagery to the seamless integration of LaTeX in my blog. I made it clear from the outset that I wanted an ongoing dialogue during the process of design, and that’s exactly what AWP gave me. I am sure that it would have been much easier both for me and for AWP if I had just let them do everything, but this way I got the website of my dreams.