New ISciences website

The second draft of the departmental website for Leicester’s Interdisciplinary Science Centre has gone online. It’s been an interesting problem. There’s the first step which is common to all university departmental websites which is how you make the department look enticing, while keeping the important information accessible. The second problem, which a Physics or Biology department wouldn’t have is that we have to explain what i-Science, or rather now ISciences, is or possibly are.

I’ve used the standard University templates for the site, which makes life easier. The templates used to be pretty bad, because they used colours designed for print, but I’m really impressed with how the Computer Centre’s listened to that and come up with something quite attractive. It makes life a lot easier if someone else has already decided whether to go with two columns or three and sorted out the colour scheme. I’m slightly colour-blind, so I tend to work out colour by number.

The really cool thing though is hidden in the left side menu. Scroll down and you’ll see the Menu options, but beneath on each page a list of the latest posts to the ISciences weblog. I’ve sent round instructions on how to sign up to WordPress to the centre staff and hopefully the weblog will pick up. I’ll have to see if we can rebrand the weblog to look a bit closer to the departmental site. So right now there’s a link to a post on the Science Blogging Anthology on the departmental homepage.

There are changes that need to be made. There’ll be more testimonials put in as there’s an awful lot of Robert Winston at the moment. I know there’s an argument that you can’t have too much Robert Winston, but other people have said nice things about the course too. I’ll also be looking to take up Jonny Woodward’s suggestion on how to get more staff opinion back into the site, so you can see why some of us are working on this course.