Experiment №1
Lab Branding, end-to-end
Promote your lab with a hand-built, highly customizable, management-free site.
Background
Why labs need a different option
Most academic PIs at the University of Calgary end up choosing between two homepage options, and neither gives a working lab what it really needs:
- WordPress on the institutional platform. Offered
as
wpsites.ucalgary.ca/<your-lab>— a shared subdirectory with limited branding control. Institutional IT does not offer a vanity subdomain like<your-lab>.ucalgary.ca, so even the URL carries less institutional weight with grant reviewers, editors, and prospective trainees. WordPress itself brings plug-in maintenance, recurring security advisories, theme-update collisions, and an admin interface designed for blogs, not research labs. Underlying reliability — TLS renewals, server uptime, content-edit access — depends on institutional IT, which has its own documented track record. - Google Sites with a custom domain. Free, reliable, and the path many PIs take out of necessity. But the customization ceiling is low: templates are generic, layout options are narrow, and the result rarely reads like a serious research lab on first impression — which matters when the first reader is a grant reviewer, a journal editor, or a prospective trainee.
Lab Branding is a third
option, built and maintained by members of the Bioinformatics
Hub at the University of Calgary. We run the infrastructure
ourselves on dedicated AWS in Canada (ca-west-1), and we
model the homepage around the things
academic biology actually needs — publications, ORCID profiles, trial
IDs, funders, trainee roles. Same campus, same constraints, same
understanding of what a lab homepage has to do — but with the
infrastructure and ongoing maintenance fully on our side, so you can focus on science.
What's covered
Four pillars, one package
Lab Branding covers more than a website — it's the whole visual handshake your lab makes with the world.
01
Identity
Name, tagline, colour palette, hero imagery, logo — and your own domain (e.g., yourlab.ca). The visual handshake that says this is a real lab.
02
Academic homepage
Members, publications, active projects, software, and contact. Every field a PI actually needs, thoughtfully structured for academic biology.
03
Hosting & backup
We guarantee backups, even if something goes wrong, and your site lives on the AWS Calgary infrastructure that runs TheBioHub.ca — backed by 24/7 monitoring.
04
Hassle-free maintenance
Email us your updates and we publish within 48 hours. The platform improves continuously, so every lab gets new features as we release them.
How it works
From a theme keyword to a live site
Most labs go live in about a month of working time once we have your assets.
-
01
Pick a theme
A library of themes, ready for you to claim: browse the live demos below. If one of them speaks to you, it's yours — we keep each theme tied to a single lab, and you move straight to step 04 from there.
Prefer something custom-designed? Continue to step 02.
-
02
Design package optional
Want more creative control? Open Stitch by Google and prompt it with something like:
"A modern academic lab homepage for a wet-lab in immunology. Bright, content-first, minimal type, hero image of zebrafish embryos. Three sections: who we are, what we work on, recent papers. Here is our current website for reference:
<your-lab-url>."Stitch will produce a mockup you can export.
-
03
Save the Stitch export optional
Download the Stitch mockup as a
.zipand keep it ready — you'll include it with everything else in a single email at step 05. We translate the mockup into the engine's design tokens — colours, font face, spacing — so your site inherits the look you picked. -
04
Fill in the intake form
Fill in the intake form — identity, members, publications, projects, funders, contact. Click Download to get your configuration file
lab_config.yaml. -
05
Send us your assets
Email the configuration file, member photos, Stitch design mockup (if you exported), and (if you have one) your lab logo to us.
-
06
We build, you review
First draft lands within a month on a private preview URL. You review, we revise. Usually 1–2 rounds until you're happy.
-
07
We ship and deploy
Site goes live on your custom domain (we handle the registration, DNS, and the security certificate end-to-end).
-
08
Maintenance — just email us!
After launch, your homepage stays current with zero hassle. New paper? New trainee? New grant? Just email us and we publish within 48 hours. No portals, no logins, no learning curves.
Pricing
Flat, transparent, academic
Lab-grade homepages at academic-friendly rates — quality you'd expect to pay an agency for, at a cost that fits any discretionary budget. Only at TheBioHub Labs.
All prices in CAD. Rates shown are for Snyder Institute members; other UCalgary members are subject to a 20% surcharge.
FAQ
Questions you might ask
What if I already have a lab website?
Tell us. We'll either migrate your content into our platform, or build a fresh take and let you set up an automatic redirect from your old domain when ready. Migration is included in the initial build for typical academic-lab sites.
Can I edit the site myself after launch?
Yes. Everything lives in a single lab_config.yaml file — anyone in your lab who can edit a spreadsheet can edit your homepage. We hand you the configuration file and a quick-start guide.
How many labs will TheBioHub host and maintain?
We host up to 8–10 lab websites at a time. That's roughly the number of labs whose annual maintenance fees cover the AWS infrastructure (servers, storage, networking, domains) we run TheBioHub Labs on. Once we reach capacity, new clients join a short waitlist while we expand.
Got a real-world example?
Three, actually. TheBioHub.ca itself — built and maintained by the same team, on the same AWS Calgary infrastructure — is the parent site. McDonald Lab is the first lab homepage launched on TheBioHub Labs, and Thornton Lab is the latest: working examples of the per-lab template in production.
All three run on the shared infrastructure, but the visual theme is yours to choose. We can apply our default TheBioHub theme, adapt one you already like, or build to a reference you bring (a journal style, a department site, a colour palette) — the underlying platform stays the same, the look follows your preference.
Why not Squarespace, Wix, or WordPress?
Three reasons. (1) Static HTML is faster and never breaks. (2) No monthly subscription that creeps upward over time. (3) Bio data — publications, trials, software — gets first-class fields, not generic CMS blocks.
Get started
Ready when you are
Fill in the intake form, then send us everything in one email to Bioinformatics@ucalgary.ca:
- The configuration file (
lab_config.yaml) - Member photos
- (optional) Design package
- (optional) Lab logo
First draft of your homepage usually lands within a month.