I’ve released our new design for the www.molcyt.com website. Like many other people with websites designed 5 years ago, the old design was very “Web 1.0” with no feedbacks, social media links or other active content. And updates had been left for so long that many parts were out of date; technically, the HTML coding had become increasingly complex and there was no content management system (CMS). The University uses Plone for content management, a system I looked into; however, Plone sites seem to rank low in Google searchability, I already knew something about WordPress from blogging on AoBBlog.com, and the University managers are incredibly restrictive on webspace: a few Mb increase needs several emails and long justifications!

I decided to use WordPress registered at http://www.MolCyt.ORG for CMS and then RSS feeds from this site to populate content on http://www.MolCyt.COM (where it can be displayed either as single-line headline links, or complete, scrolling, posts – see for example the Conference page using my blogs from AoBBlog) . The parent .com site is still prepared from Dreamweaver, and uses various Creative Commons templates for framing the content. There is a core which still needs to be managed from Dreamweaver, not least the slider on the homepage and summaries of contents, but hopefully it will be more straightforward to populate and update.

Now there is only the problem of generating high-quality but short text for new descriptions of our research projects, and where appropriate transferring current content across. All this is still ‘under construction’ … anyway, feedback will be gratefully received.