Hello new website

Our new website is online! The old website served us well for many years but was slowly starting to show its age. Direct editing of html files stops being fun after a little while. The old website used a number of venerable technologies like jquery, bootstrap, and material design. So far so good. However the heavy used of tethered anchors made for a dizzying up-and-down navigation and the javascript had become difficult to manage due to the need to change things in many places simultaneously.

It was time for a change. How to choose what technology to use with so many options available out there though? The old website got something perfectly right in my opinion. It was just a bunch of flat files. That's great, no maintenance, no server downtime, no special server needs. Most websites will be read many more times than will be interacted with and this is certainly the case for a research group website. Would be nice to have a database though and some kind of minimal templating to avoid all the manual work and give some structure to the website.

We chose to use Lektor, a flat-file site generator with a pseudo-database and an admin panel. The styling is done with TailwindCSS which lets you work directly on the html code. Hope you enjoy the new look!