How a scholarly site gets built
Building a researcher's site is a disciplined sequence, not a template drop. Seven phases take the work from a scattered scholarly record to a fast, findable, durable instrument.
From record to instrument
Discovery of the scholarly record
We start by gathering the whole footprint — publications, preprints, talks, teaching, datasets, funding, and profiles across ORCID, Scholar, and beyond — so nothing that documents the career is left behind.
Content model
Every kind of scholarly output becomes a structured custom post type with typed fields. Modelling publications, talks, projects, courses, and datasets as data — not prose — makes the record consistent, filterable, and future-proof.
Design system & tokens
We define one system: colour, type scale, spacing, radius, and components as design tokens. Committing to an editorial aesthetic up front means every page that follows is coherent by construction.
Build
The site is built as a classic WordPress theme — lightweight, standards-based, and maintainable by any developer. Reusable components render each paper, talk, and card identically, with sensible fallbacks so empty content still looks finished.
Import & structured data
The scholarly record is imported into the content model, and each output emits Highwire tags and JSON-LD. This is where the site becomes legible to Google Scholar, indexers, and reference managers.
Quality assurance
We test against accessibility (WCAG AAA contrast, keyboard paths, screen readers), performance (Core Web Vitals, a sixteen-millisecond frame budget), and SEO. Nothing ships with a known defect in a touched area.
Launch & iteration
After launch the site is a living instrument. Adding a paper or a talk is routine data entry, and the design system renders it correctly — so the record stays current across a whole career without a rebuild.
What holds through every phase
Content outlives design
Separating content from presentation means a future redesign edits tokens, not templates, and never risks the record itself.
Findability is a feature
Structured metadata is built in from the first paper, not bolted on later, because being correctly indexed is what turns work into citations.
Accessible by default
Semantic markup and AAA contrast are the baseline, so the site reaches every reader and every crawler equally.
Maintainable by anyone
Standard WordPress and clear conventions mean the site can be handed off and kept current long after launch.
Ready to build the record?
Whether you are launching a first site or migrating a decade of work, the process is the same disciplined sequence.