Today, I will talk about the design of my personal research webpage, which has evolved over the years from 2006 (the first year of my PhD) til today (2021). It is around 2006 that I decided to buy a .com domain name to make a webpage. My goal at that time was to have a Web presence so that people could easily find the PDFs of my research papers and also read about my research. The design of my webpage did not change so much over the years, as you can see below:
On the top left, it is the first version of my webpage, with a white background. That webpage was HTML 4 compliant and had a few subsections like “Main”, “Publications”, “Software” and “About me”. From 2006 to 2009, I made minor changes to the website, mainly to update my list of papers, change my picture (a few times) and add some other information. Then, around 2012, a student from Algeria, Hanane Amirat, gently offered to redesign my website, with a colored background as can be seen on the top right, which made it look better. At that time, I was also starting to work as professor and added more sections to my website, including a link to this blog. Then, around 2020, I redesigned the website again to make the site suitable for mobile devices, as search engines started to take this into account. This version can be seen at the bottom left. That version from 2020 looks almost the same as the 2017 version but under the hood, I have modified the website to use a responsive design template so that the menu can be dynamically resized on mobile devices.
Do you like the latest version of the website? If not, or if you have some suggestions to improve it, please leave a comment below 🙂 Maybe it is time to change the design again 🙂 In fact, I feel that the website colors are a little bit dark. Maybe it would be time to change to another design…
That is all I wanted to share today. If you are a researcher and do not have a website yet, I recommend to make one , or at least to have a page on websites such as ResearchGate and LinkedIn. This will bring more visibility to your research work!
—
Philippe Fournier-Viger is a distinguished professor working in China and founder of the SPMF open source data mining software.
