Initial Summary
Computer science faculty websites occupy a specific and consequential position in the academic web ecosystem. They are actively evaluated by prospective PhD students who are often sophisticated, technically literate, and accustomed to well-designed digital products. A student who writes production code evaluates a faculty website with a different eye than a student in the humanities. They are assessed by industry collaborators from technology companies who are familiar with professional-grade web presence. They are visited by journalists and policy advisors following AI, cybersecurity, and systems research. And they are compared sometimes directly and explicitly against the websites of faculty at peer institutions during hiring processes and grant committee reviews. A CS faculty website that is structurally poor, visually outdated, or technically broken sends a specific negative signal in a field where digital credibility is itself a professional asset. This guide covers how to build a CS faculty or CS research lab website that serves all of these audiences effectively, from structural planning through design and technical implementation to ongoing maintenance.
What Makes CS Faculty Websites Different
Computer science faculty websites have specific characteristics that distinguish them from academic websites in other disciplines.
Research output is more linkable. CS research often produces code repositories, datasets, project demos, and open-access preprints that can be directly linked from a faculty site. A materials science professor's publications link to journal papers behind paywalls; a CS professor's publications might link to arXiv preprints, GitHub repositories, demo applications, and conference presentation videos. This richness of linkable output is an opportunity that CS faculty websites consistently underuse.
Research demos are possible and expected. In fields like HCI, machine learning, computer vision, and NLP, research produces interactive outputs that can be demonstrated on or linked from a website. A faculty website that includes a link to a working demo of a research system communicates the research far more vividly than a paper abstract. This is a significant competitive advantage that most CS faculty websites do not exploit.
Technical failure is particularly visible. A broken link, a 404 error, or a JavaScript console error on a CS faculty website is noticed by the technically literate visitors most likely to be evaluating that faculty member's work. A humanities professor with a broken website link might be forgiven; a professor of computer systems with a broken website creates an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance.
Research groups are often collaborative, multi-person environments. CS research labs typically involve multiple students, postdocs, and visiting researchers simultaneously. Faculty websites that function as research lab sites need to manage team presentation, student recruitment, and research group communications in a way that single-person academic sites do not.
Phase 1: Planning the Site Structure
Before any design or development work, map the structure of the site explicitly. A well-planned structure prevents the need to rebuild later and ensures the site can grow without becoming unwieldy.
Recommended Structure for a CS Faculty Website
Homepage — Research identity statement, brief bio, and navigation to all primary sections. Should answer the question "Who is this person and what do they work on?" within ten seconds.
Research — Overview of research areas with plain-language descriptions. Each research area or project links to a dedicated sub-page where appropriate. Must be navigable by visitors who are not specialists in the specific subfield.
Publications — Complete, up-to-date, text-based list with links to accessible versions. For CS, this means arXiv links, ACM Digital Library links, IEEE Xplore links, or PDFs as appropriate. Conference papers (which are primary research contributions in CS in a way they are not in all disciplines) should be clearly presented alongside journal papers.
Projects / Software — A page dedicated to research software, code repositories, datasets, and demos is appropriate for most CS faculty. This is the page that industry visitors and prospective collaborators will look at most carefully.
People / Lab — For PIs with research groups: a structured presentation of all current lab members (PhD students, postdocs, visiting researchers) with brief bios, research focus descriptions, and links to personal pages where they exist. Alumni tracking (where are former students now?) is a highly effective credibility signal for prospective PhD applicants.
Teaching — Current courses with brief descriptions and links to course materials where they are publicly available.
Contact / Join — Explicit guidance for prospective PhD students, postdocs, and collaborators on how to approach, what to include in an initial email, and — critically — whether positions are currently available. Vague "if you're interested in working with me, email me" guidance frustrates prospective students. Specific guidance on current openings and application process significantly improves application quality.
Key Insight: The "Projects / Software" page is the most distinctively valuable page a CS faculty website can have — and the one most often absent. A well-maintained projects page that links to live demos, GitHub repositories, and released datasets communicates the practical reality of the research in a way that a publications list cannot. Industry collaborators visiting a CS faculty site are often making a quick assessment of whether the research has practical applications relevant to their context. A clear, navigable projects page with brief descriptions of what each piece of software does and who might use it is the single highest-impact addition most CS faculty websites are missing.
Phase 2: Design Principles for CS Faculty Websites
Clean, Functional Aesthetics
The design register for CS faculty websites should be clean, functional, and technically credible. Overly decorative or visually complex designs create cognitive friction for visitors who are there to evaluate research, not appreciate design. Conversely, a complete absence of design investment — a site that looks like raw HTML from 2005 — creates a negative credibility signal in a field where digital competence is professionally relevant.
The appropriate register is closer to what good developer documentation looks like: clean typography, clear hierarchy, functional navigation, and visual design that serves the content rather than competing with it.
Good reference points for this aesthetic:
- Stripe's documentation style (clean, well-typeset, functional)
- GitHub's profile pages (information-dense but well-organised)
- The personal websites of respected CS researchers
Real-World CS Faculty Website Examples
These are faculty websites that demonstrate effective design, structure, and communication for CS contexts:
Srinivasan Keshav (Cambridge, networking) — research.cs.cam.ac.uk/~sk — Exceptionally clean, functional, and maintained. Direct research descriptions, clean publication list, clear contact information.
Percy Liang (Stanford, NLP/AI) — cs.stanford.edu/~pliang — Research lab format with clear project pages, well-organised publication list, and alumni tracking that demonstrates research group success.
Dan Jurafsky (Stanford, NLP) — web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky — Demonstrates how a high-volume publication record can be presented clearly with appropriate organisation and filtering.
Emma Brunskill (Stanford, RL) — cs.stanford.edu/people/ebrun — Clean, well-structured, with strong student recruitment section and clear lab information.
Manolis Kellis (MIT, computational biology) — compbio.mit.edu — Research group website that effectively presents a large lab with multiple concurrent research directions.
The GitHub Integration Consideration
For CS faculty whose research produces open-source code, integrating GitHub activity or repository links into the website is a genuine value-add, not just a technical display. A faculty website that links directly to active GitHub repositories with recent commits communicates active research in a way that static text cannot.
Options range from embedding a GitHub activity widget (lightweight, easy, somewhat limited) to creating dedicated project pages that describe the software context and link to the repository. The latter is more useful for non-technical visitors who need the description to understand what the code does.
Phase 3: Technical Implementation
Recommended Platforms for CS Faculty Websites
Jekyll + GitHub Pages (Recommended for technical faculty comfortable with static sites)
Jekyll is a static site generator widely used in the academic CS community. It produces fast, secure, version-controlled websites hosted for free via GitHub Pages. Many CS academics maintain their sites this way, and a number of clean, well-designed academic Jekyll themes are available (e.g., the Academic Pages theme). The workflow — editing Markdown files and pushing to GitHub — is natural for researchers already using git. The limitation is that non-technical users find it inaccessible.
Webflow (Recommended for design-quality research lab sites)
Webflow offers the most design flexibility of any no-code platform and produces clean, fast HTML/CSS output. It is well-suited for CS research lab sites where design quality matters and someone on the team is willing to learn the Webflow interface. It is not version-controlled in the same way as Jekyll and is not free.
WordPress (Recommended for flexibility + plugin ecosystem)
WordPress with a quality academic theme (e.g., the Academic theme, or a custom theme) is the most flexible option and has the largest ecosystem of plugins for specific needs. It requires more ongoing maintenance than a static site (security updates, plugin updates) but offers more extensibility.
Hugo (Alternative to Jekyll)
Hugo is faster to build than Jekyll and is increasingly used in the academic CS community. Similar workflow to Jekyll, excellent theme availability, free hosting on GitHub Pages or Netlify.
Publication Management
Managing a large CS publication list is a structural challenge. The approaches in increasing order of maintenance burden and corresponding quality:
Manual HTML/Markdown list — Simple, low-maintenance, but requires manual update with every new publication.
BibTeX-driven static generation — For Jekyll and Hugo sites, plugins can automatically generate a publications page from a BibTeX file. This is the most common approach for technically-oriented faculty, as the BibTeX file is already maintained for citation management.
Google Scholar embed/link — Linking to Google Scholar profile is a good supplement but not a replacement for on-site publication listing. Google Scholar's indexing is not always complete or correctly attributed.
Automated pull from semantic scholar or similar — Some faculty use APIs to pull publication data automatically. This is technically elegant but introduces dependency on external services and their data quality.
Is Your CS Faculty Website Serving the Audiences That Matter Most?
A computer science faculty website needs to do more than list publications — it should clearly communicate research, support student recruitment, and make projects accessible to collaborators and industry visitors. Getting the structure, content, and technical implementation right makes a significant difference in how your work is understood and discovered.
→ See how we build CS research websites
Performance and Technical Standards
CS faculty websites are held to higher technical standards than academic websites in other disciplines by the technically literate visitors who will inspect them. The following technical baseline is appropriate:
Checklist:
- Site loads in under two seconds on desktop (Google PageSpeed score above 80)
- HTTPS enforced with a valid SSL certificate
- No broken links (check with a tool like Broken Link Checker monthly)
- Mobile responsive (tested on actual mobile devices, not just browser simulation)
- No JavaScript console errors on page load
- All external links (GitHub repos, paper PDFs) are active and correctly pointed
- Site has an XML sitemap submitted to Google Search Console
Phase 4: The Student Recruitment Section
The student recruitment section of a CS faculty website is often the highest-traffic section for PIs who are actively seeking PhD students or postdocs, and the section most commonly done poorly.
What prospective PhD students actually need from a faculty website's recruitment section:
- Whether positions are currently open stating this explicitly saves both parties time
- What research areas current openings are in a student strong in NLP who is considering systems research needs to know which direction you are currently hiring for
- What the application process is linking directly to the graduate admissions portal and explaining the timeline is genuinely useful
- What kind of student you are looking for not just academic qualifications but working style, research interest depth, and background
- Evidence of what former students are doing now the most persuasive recruitment signal for PhD applicants is seeing that your alumni have gone on to positions they wanted (faculty jobs, research positions, industry roles)
The alumni section as a recruitment tool:
A well-maintained "Lab Alumni" or "Where Are They Now?" section on a CS faculty website is one of the most effective recruitment assets available. A list of ten former PhD students with their current positions (Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, Assistant Professor at KAIST, Engineering Lead at Palantir) communicates lab quality and career outcome in a way that no written claim can match.
Key Insight: For CS faculty, the website is also a research communication asset in a way that differs from most other disciplines. A conference paper in CS often has a companion project page with a dedicated URL with the paper abstract, full paper PDF, code repository link, demo link, and bibtex citation block. These project pages, linked from the faculty website, are themselves indexed by search engines and often rank for the paper title and research area terms. Building a systematic habit of creating clean project pages for significant publications is one of the most effective long-term research visibility strategies available to CS faculty, and most of the infrastructure for it already exists on a well-built faculty website.
Is Your CS Faculty Website Working as a Research Communication Platform or Just an Online CV?
Many faculty websites simply list publications and contact details, but an effective CS website actively communicates research, showcases projects and software, and supports collaboration and student recruitment. A focused consultation can help identify the structural, design, and technical decisions needed to turn your site into a true research platform.
→ Book a CS faculty website consultation
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I use an institutional faculty page or build my own site?
Use both. Your institutional faculty page is a trust anchor — it links from the university domain and appears in institutional searches. Your personal site is where you control narrative, update independently, and present your research identity with the depth and specificity an institutional template can't accommodate. Link the two bidirectionally and use your personal site as the primary platform for research communication.
How should I handle publications that are not open access?
Link to the DOI (which takes visitors to the journal's page) and additionally provide an author's preprint version where your institution's or journal's policy permits. Most CS conferences and journals permit posting of author's final manuscripts on personal or institutional websites. Checking your publisher's policy via SHERPA/RoMEO is the reliable way to confirm what you can post.
How often should a CS faculty website be updated?
Publications should be updated as accepted papers are confirmed, not after final publication (the lag between acceptance and publication in CS venues can be months). The homepage should be updated when your research focus shifts or your position changes. The recruitment section should be updated at the start of each academic recruiting cycle. A quarterly check for broken links is appropriate for sites with many external links to repositories and demos.
Is it worth building project pages for every paper?
Not necessarily for every paper, but consistently for work you consider significant or that you expect to generate interest beyond your immediate subfield. Project pages for your five to ten most important papers with clean descriptions, accessible links, and bibtex blocks are worth considerably more than the equivalent time invested in any other form of research communication on your website.
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