Lawrey P1
1James Cook University, Townsville, Australia
Biography:
Pauline is based at James Cook University in North Queensland, where she works across research and corporate technology projects. She began her career as a software engineer before moving into requirements analysis and project management, with experience in Australia and internationally. She is also part of the QCIF Skills Development team, supporting researchers through practical training in Python, Unix, and Git.
Abstract:
Researchers increasingly need clear, sustainable ways to communicate project aims, progress, outputs, and impact beyond formal publications. This presentation introduces the Research Website Theme: an easily configurable Jekyll template that helps research teams create modern, professional, responsive, and accessible project websites without needing to become web developers or designers.
The project addresses a common problem in research communication: project websites are often costly to build, difficult to update, and financially unsustainable once funding ends. Rather than starting from a blank website, researchers are given a structured theme with practical page types and reusable content blocks, including landing pages, standard content pages, image carousels, galleries, information cards, text-and-image sections, and a partner organisation logo gallery. These patterns provide enough design support to create a polished site and allow teams focus on their content.
By using GitHub Pages for free hosting and Markdown for editing, the theme reduces the need to learn HTML, CSS, hosting, or web maintenance. Jekyll was chosen because it is widely adopted, well supported, and flexible enough to allow further enhancement when technical help is available. The theme also supports navigation menus, mobile-friendly layouts, versioned improvements, and institutional forks with local branding.
The presentation will outline the framework behind the theme, demonstrate how it can be customised for different research projects, and show a sample website that illustrates how researchers can move from content to a maintained public web presence.
