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About Liesbeth Smit

Liesbeth combines her knowledge of science communication, technology and design to explain difficult topics to a wide audience. You can use her practical tips immediately in your presentations to create a bigger impact. She developed dozens of websites, e-learning modules for The Online Scientist and published a best-selling book about nutrition science.
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Put your team in the spotlight: our guide to create better team pages on your website

We encounter them too often: unattractive team pages with holiday snapshots and boring bios. But your researchers are doing all the work, so we say it’s about time to put them in the spotlight they deserve! With this guide, we will help you take better profile pictures, design an attractive team page, and write interesting bios for your consortium members. Let’s get started! Should you create a separate Team page? If you do not want to showcase your research team on a separate page, you can just create a team section on your About page with a list of names and research roles. However, we think it’s a nice touch to create a team page with a bit more information about the people in your research department or consortium. We like to give navigation menu items a more interesting name, so let’s call your team page “Meet the team”, “About our researchers”, or “Get to know us”. What personal information do you put on a team page? The information in your team profiles should be relevant for the website, but it also shouldn't be impersonal or boring. That’s why it's good to try to include a bit of creativity, and maybe include a personal quote, your favorite food, or another fun fact about someone. This really makes a team page come alive. Here are some items we often include in a profile page: Full name with your titles - but leave out the impersonal initials.Role within this research group - e.g. Project manager, Early Stage Researchers (ESR), or Senior researcherPersonal quote - e.g. “I think we should pay more attention to mental health” or more quirky “I always share my cookies with my co-workers”Expertise keywords [...]

2022-02-04T10:32:15+00:00
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What should you put on your website & homepage?

Vague websites with hidden menus, confusing sliders, irrelevant stock photography and long texts that no one wants to read… And many websites are stuck in the 90s with introductions such as “Welcome to our website”. We think you can do better! We’ll share our best practices so you can make your website & homepage useful and inviting to your visitor. Your homepage is the summary of your website On your homepage you want to summarize who you are, what do you, what you offer and why it’s relevant to the visitor. Because the homepage is not a unique page with a specific topic, you can give a short impression here of what can be found on the rest of your site and entice people to dive further into your website. But be aware that nobody is going to spend hours browsing your website if they do not know who you are and why you’re relevant to them. Questions your visitors always want to know Who are you?What do you do?What problems do you solve?Is the information on your website relevant to me?Why are you the right person for me?How do I know I can trust you?What should I do on your website? With these questions - and their answers! - in mind, you can make sure your website content is relevant and useful. Questions to answer on your website Who is the main audience for your website? Who do you want to reach primarily, and who could benefit from your knowledge?Who are you and what is your main end goal or mission?What do you do, and what don’t you do?What problems do you want to solve? (From personal problems to global problems.)How does the information [...]

2022-01-27T14:51:19+00:00
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5 things you should do as a researcher to increase your impact online

What can you do to make your research stand out from the crowd? As science communicators in an online world, we have compiled the five most efficient ways to become more visible to journalists, colleagues, conference organizers and funding agencies. Have you ever Googled yourself, only to find an outdated article or forum comment from your time as a student on the first page? It can be painful, embarrassing or at least not representative of your academic progress. There are ways to control your online identity and prevent embarrassing search results. And they make sure that when other people look for you online, your desired and up-to-date social media accounts and website show up. 1 Get a personal website The first rule of standing out is that you shouldn’t be like everyone else. So while online networking tools for scientists, such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu and Google Scholar have their place (more on that later), you’ll still be just one of many colleagues. This doesn’t help your visibility. But there is another reason to want to get out of these ‘gated communities’ of science. Because, for better or worse, there is a growing requirement for researchers to engage with the general public and to ensure that your research has an impact in society as a whole. A website is a great way to overcome both these challenges.  But you’ll have to go beyond that online profile that your institute provides for you on their website; these often convey a bland, generic image and have a design that is inflexible and generally outdated. To have a page with your photo and a list of publications is just not enough to get people excited about your work. Share [...]

2022-07-05T08:45:02+00:00
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How to cite social media as references in your research article

Research is slowly moving into the real world, with studies being done using data from social media websites and interaction with the public. But what do you do when you need to cite someone’s tweet? How do you cite a Facebook post in your journal article? Is it enough to give the URL? We’ve compiled the best-practices to help you organize your citations. For social media the same rule applies that also goes for websites and other types of sources: you have to use in-text citations and a listing in your references. Be aware that publication details may vary between citations styles. If they’re not included in the official citation guide you’re using, you can adhere to the best practices we’ll discuss in this blog. Best practices for referencing social media You want to credit the person posting the information, so include their full last name followed by their initials. (Thaler, R.). If they have a screen name or post privately, for example on Facebook you can include those names in brackets: Thaler, R. [MisbehavingBlog]. If it’s an organization their full profile name is sufficient. Provide the date when the post was created: the year, month and day, or use n.d. if this is not known. When the content of the citation can change, such as a webpage, you need to add the date of retrieval. This is not necessary when the date is a part of the post, for example as in a tweet. The content of the post or the caption (if it exists) can be used as the title up to 40 words, and you should include in brackets the type of social media post e.g. [Tweet] [Facebook status update]. If the [...]

2021-12-26T15:48:32+00:00
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How to find a reliable hosting provider for your WordPress website

Finding a new hosting provider for your website can be very frustrating; online you find good and bad reviews, you never quite know what a hosting provider does for you, and maybe you lack the technical know-how to assess if they offer enough service for a safe and speedy website. We help you to avoid spending hours on the internet trying to find out which is the best host and share our experience with you. By now, we have a decade of experience with various hosting providers, and we’ve spent days looking for a good company to work with (spoiler alert: we have found a reliable one!). Since we put in so much time, we know exactly what is important when you’re choosing a hosting company. Because we work with WordPress exclusively (it is the most user-friendly software to build websites with), this article will only concern the best hosting options for WordPress sites (although these are usually great for other platforms as well). What is hosting? Hosting is a space on the internet where your website lives. It’s like the plot your house stands on. A domain name is the address for your house, and makes sure people can find your front door. Both are necessary when you want to start your own website. What do I need for website hosting? If you want a reasonably comfortable hosting package for a simple website, you’ll need the following: 500 MB of space (or 1 GB if you want to display hundreds of PDF articles and large pictures). Unlimited data traffic (is standard everywhere these days). MySQL database. Email addresses and maybe webmail (but we advise you to send and receive email through your own mail [...]

2021-12-26T15:48:37+00:00
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How to use content design to improve your science communication

What is content design? Content design is organizing, structuring, formatting and designing texts and combining them with images to create visually attractive and user-friendly content for your website, brochure or other documents. If you have a good text, but it looks like a long piece of text without formatting, people are less likely to want to read it. A nicely formatted text where various components such as headings, paragraphs, frames, quotes and references are easily recognizable enhances the user-friendliness of the text. Content design transforms your text into a visually attractive design to ensures that your key message becomes clear at a glance Write short paragraphs of 5 lines In a book or scientific publication you can get away with long pieces of text, but on a website or brochure you have to be short and to the point. Therefore you should write paragraphs that are about 5 lines long. This makes it more attractive to read and forces you to limit yourself to the key message. Use headings Headings (H1, H2, H3, H4) not only improve the readability and scannability of a page, they also help with search engine optimization (SEO). For a content designer, nothing is worse than a title written in bold font…. So write a title for each paragraph and ensure it has a hierarchy that makes sense: when you write about mammals with an H2 heading, the headings Humans and Apes that fall within that category are both H3. Write your title as a summary Don't write a descriptive title - rather, make it a summary of a paragraph. This way it is easier for people to scan your page and get a first impression of the content. So you should not [...]

2022-07-05T08:45:11+00:00
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Different logo types for your website

"I want a logo!” With these words every logo design process starts. But this isn't enough for a designer to develop the new logo for your website. It helps to know what type of logo you want, or, at least, what your preferences are. Here you find the different styles of logos so you can tell your designer what type of logo you prefer. Logos are not what you think they are Most people think a logo should include an element that shows exactly what the company is about. If you're a bakery it should include a picture of bread, if you're a hairdresser it should include some scissors. This is an old way of thinking about logos, and it's particularly bad when we talk about logos for more abstract concepts or scientific studies. Usually, the more abstract a company, initiative, or research department is, the more cliché the logo becomes. Can you imagine the Disney logo to include Mickey Mouse and a dalmatian as an icon? Or the Philips logo to include a collection of light bulbs? Or a research study about vaccines including needles and blood in their logo design? A logo can be just a good font in a color that matches the style guide! Nowadays, when I design logos for websites, I often do not design an image anymore and forgo the entire logo design process. This is because search engines and screen readers cannot read the text in an image, so they skip the text when browsing a website. This is such a shame. So for one-page websites, or website where I use big gestures, I usually use a very large font for the company name to make it stand [...]

2021-12-26T15:48:53+00:00
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