XenonPrime

About the Client

Dr. Alana Ogata is a childhood friend of Ashrut Rode’s — the founder of XenonPrime — and is currently a chemistry professor at the University of Toronto. She runs a lab that focuses on disease diagnosis and maternal health and was interested in a new website to showcase her work in a professional yet accessible manner.

The website would not only feature the rigorous scientific research done by members of The Ogata Lab but also highlight its ambitious and diverse undergraduate and graduate students and the fun social activities and conferences they partake in together with Dr. Ogata.

Background & Challenge

The initial website was a subdomain on Squarespace and created by Dr. Ogata in her free time. As seen in the images below, the website was already fairly well-designed with a dark theme, green accent color, and significant scientific and blog content.

Nevertheless, Dr. Ogata felt that the website needed a professional refresh and its own unique domain — not merely existing as a subdomain on Squarespace. In our exploratory call, Dr. Ogata discussed the following issues with our team:

• Preserving the dark theme with green accent color.
• Discussing complex chemistry research in a way that is accessible to a broad audience.
• Listing the lab’s extensive publication history in reverse chronological and numbered format.
• Creating a contact us page to discuss opportunities for prospective undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral researchers.
• Displaying the fun and research sides of the lab through a blog organized into categories such as fun, conferences, and announcements.
• Write short biographies for lab members and an in-depth biographical account for Dr. Ogata.
• Providing resources for historically underrepresented groups in the sciences as part of Dr. Ogata’s DEI efforts.

After our discussion, Dr. Ogata hired XenonPrime to implement her web design vision into a reality.

Our Solution

Based on the approved scope, we worked to clean up the design in a new WordPress website and borrowed most of the images and text from the prior website built on Squarespace. In places where images were missing, we relied on Pexels.com to provide copyright-free pictures for the website. Common image themes centered around the sciences and landmarks in Toronto.

The heaviest lift was redesigning the blog section. On the Squarespace website, Dr. Ogata had listed all events on one page in a flowing format, with recent events continuously added to the top. As WordPress is excellent for blogs — it started off as a blogging platform but has since expanded dramatically — we instead took all of the content and created individual posts for each one. It took a significant amount of time and effort, but after approximately 55 posts created, we were done! As previously mentioned, we also organized the blog posts into broad yet distinct categories so that Dr. Ogata could better filter her content.

Lastly, to create a publications list in reverse chronological order, we coded custom JavaScript and successfully added it to the WordPress website. Now the lab’s publication history is organized in an easy-to-understand and relevant format.

Results

Dr. Ogata was thrilled with the website, describing it as beautiful and gorgeous. We were also able to save her a significant amount of money on hosting fees, as the $3.50/month cost at Hostinger is considerably cheaper than the $20/month cost for Squarespace. Many of her research colleagues have similarly praised the website, and we’re honored to have helped showcase her distinguished career in a digital format.

Client Testimonial

“XenonPrime was a great option for redesigning my website. The company’s founder, Ashrut Rode, went through the process of transferring all my information from my Squarespace website to a new and improved WordPress website. We had zoom calls so they could understand what my vision was for the website. The final result is a clean, modern look with an awesome dark theme. I highly recommend XenonPrime for anyone interested in a new website!”

— Alana Ogata, Chemistry Professor at the University of Toronto and head of The Ogata Lab