Emilio Bruna admits that his first laboratory website was painfully ugly. Bruna, a plant ecologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, put together the site in 2002 using Microsoft FrontPage software. The background colour was a homely tan, the text was unevenly indented and a news ticker advertising for research-assistant applicants crawled along the bottom of the page. Bruna calls the look “horrible”. He later upgraded to a university website template, but he disliked the generic corporate look.

He was never really satisfied with the design until he started using the free website-building tool WordPress last year, which allows users to choose from thousands of designs, edit from any computer and easily customize their sites with ready-made modules such as an automatically updated Twitter feed. Bruna chose a clean, attractive template and added elements such as a slideshow of current projects and blog posts. Although he acknowledges that his current site (http://brunalab.org) is still not the pinnacle of sophisticated design, he calls it a major improvement on the previous version. The new site has attracted admiring comments from colleagues, and Bruna believes that it offers a clearer, more appealing presentation of his research that provides other scientists with easy access to his papers and data.

Credit: RATCH/SHUTTERSTOCK. SCREENSHOT: R. DUNN/N. MCCOY

Many scientists consider creating and maintaining an aesthetically pleasing, up-to-date website a low priority. But a compelling lab homepage can help to attract students and funding. Some students browse potential advisers' websites to help them decide whether the lab culture is a good fit, and scientists sometimes check other researchers' sites to keep up to date on a lab's work or to decide whether they want to collaborate. Thoughtful design also makes it easier to read and process information.

“It's so important to have an appealing current webpage because this is your professional presence online,” says Liz Neeley, who is based in Seattle, Washington, and is assistant director of science outreach at the science communication organization COMPASS. “It's the face that you're showing to the broader world.”

Although social-media sites have gained importance as communication tools, a website remains a convenient, centralized source of information about projects, publications, research products and teaching — as well as an opportunity to showcase what makes the lab unique. By carefully organizing their content, considering their target audience and following some simple design guidelines (see 'Digital delight'), scientists can craft a site that presents their accomplishments and scientific approach. And with many user-friendly tools now available, building a new website does not have to be expensive or onerous. “There's no excuse for having an ugly webpage anymore,” says Bruna.

Crafting the content

At a minimum, says Neeley, every lab website should have a concise one- to two-paragraph research summary, a list of lab members with titles and biographies, and a head shot of the principal investigator. Lab websites also often list research projects, publications, data sets, software, job openings, collaborators and contact information.

For more in-depth content, Neeley suggests a layered strategy. An overview summary on the first page could emphasize key projects and other issues that the principal investigator considers to be important, such as public outreach or open science. A research page could provide project descriptions in layman-friendly language, with links to papers or more technical information. This allows interested readers to get a range of information without diving into details right away, says Neeley. Be selective about which projects are featured on the front page; if too many are included, the less important ones “might be taking attention away from what really is relevant”, says Gaby Hernández, a graphic-design researcher and educator at the University of Houston-Downtown in Texas, who has worked with scientists on communication and data visualization.

When crafting the site, consider who it is targeting. Astronomer David Kipping used to have a somewhat crowded, blog-like website aimed at a popular audience. But when Kipping, who is currently at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, entered the job market last year, he wanted to tailor the site towards busy faculty members reviewing his applications. So with guidance from design-savvy family members, Kipping reworked the site (www.davidkipping.co.uk) to look more like an online CV, with easy-to-find pages for papers and project descriptions, and newly added information about his teaching record. His list of publications included links to the papers, as well as associated animations and 'cheat sheets' of equations that convey the main points of the studies (because many researchers might not read the entire paper). The goal was to “help the reviewer to very quickly find the relevant information”, says Kipping. And, he notes, an appealing website “can also show that you are capable of putting together a nice presentation and outreach tool”.

Details or illustrative flourishes can entice prospective students. Bruna added the slideshow of projects to his website, including images of his team's work in Brazil, partly to attract students who are interested in tropical ecosystems. The 'lab members' section mentions the activities of lab alumni and includes e-mail addresses for current students, so prospective students can contact them for input about the lab. To reduce time spent responding to e-mail enquiries, Bruna included instructions on what information prospective students should send; most applicants follow those guidelines, he says.

Emilio Bruna calls his first lab website (left) “horrible”; the updated version (right) features a slideshow. Credit: EMILIO BRUNA

But sites can use more than research summaries or publication lists to attract prospective students: they can articulate a lab's philosophy and mission, helping to set the tone for the lab's culture. Neuroscientist Kay Tye signed a contract to become an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge in 2011, and soon after, she set out to recruit the right people for her new laboratory. She put up a lab website (www.tyelab.org) that included a philosophy statement describing her expectations for lab members; she emphasized the importance of having a positive attitude, communicating honestly, supporting other lab members and taking care of oneself (for example, by making time to socialize and exercise). Many applicants have cited the philosophy statement as a reason they wanted to work with her, says Tye. And stating expectations up front deters applicants who might not be a good fit. “People who don't identify with this philosophy won't apply, and then we won't waste our time,” she says.

Some researchers even add website content to attract funding. Bruna applies primarily to the US National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia, for grants, and the agency has emphasized the importance of sharing data. So Bruna's site includes a statement supporting such policies and clear links to his data sets. “If you're an applicant for a grant, this is your opportunity to sell yourself,” he says. If funders are interested in social impact, images of the scientist working with, for example, farmers affected by the research could be helpful, says Hernández. A website can also assist with crowd-funding. In 2012, Ethan Perlstein, an independent evolutionary pharmacologist and founder of the research company Perlstein Lab in San Francisco, California, published several blog posts on his site (now at www.ethanperlstein.com) to promote a campaign to fund his amphetamine research. The campaign ultimately raised more than US$25,000 (see Nature 490, 133; 2012).

Attention to design

To get started, look at other people's websites and identify appealing elements, says Kipping. Researchers might find inspiration at the Tumblr page Great Lab Websites (http://go.nature.com/iwn9kn), which was started this year by biologist Michael Eisen at the University of California, Berkeley, or at the web-design gallery siteInspire (www.siteinspire.com).

Consider the personality or values that the site should express. Perlstein is an open-science proponent and heavy social-media user, so his front page features a stream of blog posts, videos and automatically updated content from his accounts on data sharing and social media sites. Other researchers might prefer a more conventional look. “I don't think there's one size fits all,” he says.

Choose images that are specific to the research. For example, ecologists often use pictures of forests, but a close-up of the plant species being studied would be more unique, says Hernández. Ensure that images are in focus and have enough contrast to clearly show the subject.

Simple fonts such as Helvetica are easier to read than ornate fonts, and dark grey text generally looks better than black, which can appear too heavy, adds Hernández. A light background is easier on the eyes, and the colour of links should be clearly distinguishable from non-linked text. When choosing the link colour, stick with the site's existing colour palette; for example, a website with blue border lines could also have blue links.

But scientists don't need design expertise to create an appealing website — many 'ready-made' website templates are available. WordPress is one of the most popular sources of free design templates; Kipping used a template from the Mac program RapidWeaver; and the online service Squarespace offers slick designs and web hosting starting at $8 per month. Whatever template they choose, researchers should ensure that the design has been optimized for mobile devices with, for example, alternative layouts that are easier to view on a smaller screen.

Like it or not, we are in the business of marketing and promoting our work.

Costs for a customized site can vary depending on the requirements. Neil Mccoy, a freelance web designer in Raleigh, North Carolina, who specializes in science communication, charges $60 per hour and says that an academic site usually costs between $1,000 and $3,000; sites at the higher end of the price range might involve custom graphics or a large amount of content, such as many pages or photo galleries. Perlstein paid a company about $8,000 for his website, which has advanced features such as the automatic import of content from alternative metrics sites. The design process, complete with mock-ups and a test site for Perlstein's review, took about three months. However, for scientists on a budget, graphic-design students might be willing to build a simple site relatively cheaply.

Improving a site doesn't have to take a lot of time. Bruna spent a weekend setting up his WordPress site and now spends about an hour per week updating it with news. But updates every couple of months, when papers are published or accepted, will probably suffice for most scientists. Researchers could reduce maintenance time by displaying only representative publications rather than a comprehensive list. If overhauling the entire site sounds overwhelming, focus on the improvement that would yield the biggest gain, such as writing an overview statement or updating the publications list, says Neeley. Finishing a simple site is better than leaving a complicated one under construction; a website should not look like an abandoned project, says Attila Csordas, a bioinformatician at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, UK, who helped to judge a 2007 lab-website competition hosted by The Scientist.

The rise of social media means that websites bear less of the burden of representing the lab than they did several years ago, says Csordas. Even so, the lab website remains a key element of a scientist's public profile. “Like it or not, we are in the business of marketing and promoting our work,” says Bruna. “Those things do matter.”