Research labs and groups
A lab website that survives student turnover
What matters
What your website should do for you
A people page that reflects the real group
Members join and leave every term. Moving someone from current members to alumni, with their new position, should take one request rather than an afternoon of editing.
Recruitment that reaches the right applicants
Open PhD, postdoc and technician positions need clear eligibility, deadlines and application routes, and they need to disappear when they close.
Research explained for several audiences
Funders, collaborators, prospective students and the public read the same site. Themes should be described in plain language, with links to the technical outputs.
Shared ownership
Editing should not depend on one person's login or memory. Several members can work with Replit Agent, and every change is reviewed in a preview first.
Pages your site could have
A starting point. We plan the final pages around your content.
- Home
- The group's question in one sentence, current highlights and the principal investigator
- Research
- Themes and active projects, each with funders acknowledged and outputs linked
- People
- Current members by role, alumni with where they went next
- Publications
- Group outputs by year, with preprints, data and code links
- Join us
- Open positions with deadlines, plus how to approach the group about future opportunities
- News
- Papers, awards, grants, outreach and lab events
Features you can add
Member profiles with roles
Each member has a short profile and photo; a single request moves them to alumni.
Positions with closing dates
Open positions show their deadline, and you ask for them to be removed or archived when they close.
Project pages
One page per funded project, acknowledging the funder in the wording your grant requires.
Data and code links
Links to repositories, datasets and supplementary materials hosted in your existing services.
Publication import Larger addition, quoted separately
Build the publication list from a shared BibTeX file or ORCID records, reviewed before publishing.
In your own words
Changes you could ask for
Request 01
“Move Priya Raman to alumni, add "Postdoctoral fellow, University of Toronto" under her name, and add our two new MSc students with the attached photos.”
Request 02
“Add a funded PhD position on soil microbiomes closing 15 March, with the eligibility text from this email, and link it from the home page.”
Request 03
“Our NSERC Discovery grant was renewed. Update the funding acknowledgement on the coastal sediments project page.”
A fictional example
Moving from an old site
Before
A twelve-person group runs a WordPress site set up by a former postdoc. Plugins have not been updated for years, and nobody is sure who still has the administrator password.
The move
We export the existing pages and images, rebuild the site on Replit with structured people, project and publication sections, and redirect the old addresses that grant reports and papers already link to.
After
The PI and a lab manager both edit through Replit Agent. Larger changes, such as a new project section for a major grant, can be sent to us under a management agreement.
What we will ask you for
- Member list with roles, photos and consent to publish each person's name and image
- Short descriptions of research themes and active projects
- Funder acknowledgement wording required by each grant
- Publication list or a shared BibTeX/ORCID source
- Any institutional branding rules that apply to group websites
Works with tools you already use
- Links to GitHub, GitLab, OSF, Zenodo or institutional data repositories
- Links to the institution's official application portal for graduate positions
- Embedded talks and outreach videos from existing video hosting
Questions
Common questions
How is this different from a personal academic site?
A personal site follows one career. A lab site is about a team and its projects: people come and go, positions open and close, and outputs belong to the group. The structure is built around that churn.
Can several lab members edit the site?
Yes. You decide who has access to the Replit project. Each change is described to Replit Agent, checked in a preview and then published, so it is clear what changed.
Will it meet our university's web requirements?
Yes. We build to the branding and accessibility rules your university provides, so the site is ready for your communications office to review.