Liesbeth Smit

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 Have you ever Googled yourself, only to find an outdated article or forum comment from your time as a student on the first page?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for you on their website; these often convey a bland, generic image and have a design that is inflexible and generally outdated.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 [...]

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 knowhow 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 [...]

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 [...]