Swager Group

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

The Swager Group was looking to modernize its website to make it a more attractive place to publish information about the lab's research, members, and activities.

The previous site, built using static HTML and hosted in Professor Tim Swager's Athena locker, had not undergone a design refresh in years, and maintaining the content there was taking too much time and effort.

The lab needed a site that was easier to maintain, had a clean look and feel, and allowed group members to collaborate on publishing content, so they chose to give Drupal Cloud a try, and launched a fresh site: http://swagergroup.mit.edu

"The site is the work of multiple people in our lab who contributed ideas and put in the work," said Jan M. Schnorr, a Postdoctoral Associate in the Swager Laboratory. "It actually worked quite well with multiple people - seems like a big advantage of drupal vs. a more classical (non-CMS) website."

Using the tools built into Drupal Cloud's default "theme," MIT Adaptive, the group uploaded a background image of their building and chose a simple, clean color scheme.

Drupal Cloud's news feature enables the group to publish regular updates on member achievements and events related to the lab's work.

The group took advantage of the Biblio module to manage an extensive list of publications.

Drupal Cloud's built-in content editing and formatting tools enabled easy creation of group member pages, an alumi list, an equipment list, photos, and contact information, all with no expenditure on design or development.