Redesigning a scientist's personal research website

December 5, 2015 10:01 AM

I'm looking to redesign my personal research site and I'm thinking to use a blogging platform such as WordPress; however, I can't seem to find any good, clean and modern templates. In particular, I would like to add sections for my publications, recent news, scripts I have written, and my upcoming talks / presentations. Does anyone have suggestions for a robust platform and any themes that I could use for the site? Thanks!
posted by Aanidaani to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Wordpress works great. Picking a theme is a personal choice. I suggest www.themeforest.com and filter for "clean" or "minimal"

There have been three or four wordpress askme's in the last couple of weeks. They have some simple theme suggestions if you want to look them up.
posted by humboldt32 at 10:21 AM on December 5, 2015

Best answer: I know a lot of scientists who use Weebly
posted by hydropsyche at 10:59 AM on December 5, 2015

Yes, WordPress should work just fine for what you want. It is a robust platform and has many themes to choose from. That said,

I can't seem to find any good, clean and modern templates.

It would be good to define terms here: What do you mean by "good", "clean", and "modern"? Those words could describe many different themes.

Have you tried using the theme filter at Wordpress.com yet? Go to the Theme Showcase or My Sites → Themes menu option in your site’s dashboard. Click on "Free" and then click on "More".
https://wordpress.com/themes/
posted by jammy at 3:24 PM on December 5, 2015

WordPress is a great choice for this. (It's also how I earn my living, so I might be biased.) If you want something really robust that won't break down on you in a year, I'd suggest checking out the Genesis Framework and the available StudioPress child themes.

The themes won't feel as fancy as many of the themes you'll find on ThemeForest and the like, but they'll last a lot longer without giving you trouble.
posted by nosila at 3:27 PM on December 5, 2015

WordPress with Divi.
posted by moons in june at 7:27 PM on December 5, 2015

Salient theme is great and does everything you have asked for.
posted by my-username at 8:29 AM on December 6, 2015

I'm a professional WordPress developer, and for almost everyone who's asked me about setting up a personal website recently, I've recommended Squarespace. I find it to be more intuitive to get up and running than WordPress, and no maintenance to worry about. Their templates are awesome, too.

If you're set on WordPress, I'd probably recommend the hosted version at WordPress.com. You can pay for access to premium themes that are also quite nice and they've had some back-end upgrades that aren't available on the self-hosted version.
posted by orange_square at 6:49 PM on December 6, 2015

Response by poster: Thank you all for your suggestions. After looking at the different options, I found that Wordpress was a bit limiting in the structure of its pages (without extensive modification). I ended up using Adobe Muse to design a static page—using this software I was able to achieve much better control over my site, and since I post relatively infrequently it isn't a bad solution.
posted by Aanidaani at 1:27 PM on December 18, 2015 [1 favorite]