The Polar Center is a multi-disciplinary research group at SIO that brings together polar science researchers of various backgrounds. There was need for a web developer to maintain the website and also understand and communicate the science involved, so I managed polar.ucsd.edu from January 2020 to June 2021. Here are some of my additions and changes to the site:
People
The Polar Center is a fairly large group of faculty and graduate students, but most members had no presence on the site. To solve this, I designed an easily navigated page for profiles, grouped by research interest. Each Polar Center member now has their own page with a personal blurb, research interests, and any relevant links to their web presence. You can see the main page here, and here's my own profile.
News
Since joining the group, I've been updating the News section with relevant articles, often from Scripps News but also from official news outlets. The page originally had a static layout, so I redesigned it as a blog in order to make updates easy and automatic whenever a news story is posted. Here is a link to the News page.
Education
An early task was to migrate the SIO 115 (Ice and the Climate System) class page from an older website to be hosted on the Polar Center. I designed the class page for SIO 115, adding design elements to the timetable to make it easier to navigate. Later on, I added a page for SIO 121 (Biology of the Cryosphere) as well. All classes offered by Polar faculty are available on the Education page.
Polar Seminars
The Polar Center hosts regular seminars during the academic year from researchers in all areas of polar science. Despite the difficulties of transitioning online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, hosting seminars on Zoom allowed us to easily record and upload talks to the Polar Center YouTube channel. I've made all the recorded seminars available on the Activities page, featuring some graphic design work for the thumbnails.