Creating and Maintaining a WordPress Site for a Consortium of Bioinformatics Researchers
Project Overview
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched the Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE) to standardize metadata formatting across bioinformatics research projects. To support this effort, NIH needed a community-facing website that would inform stakeholders, encourage collaboration across research groups, and serve as the central hub for documentation.
The Challenge
The CFDE involved diverse stakeholders—researchers, data scientists, and administrators—spread across multiple institutions.
NIH required a site that could:
- Clearly communicate goals and progress to the community
- Support collaboration and knowledge sharing
- Provide seamless updates as new resources, events, and documentation became available
- Maintain consistency with NIH’s technical infrastructure, including GitHub-hosted content
- Clearly communicate goals and progress to the community
- Support collaboration and knowledge sharing
- Provide seamless updates as new resources, events, and documentation became available
- Maintain consistency with NIH’s technical infrastructure, including GitHub-hosted content
My Role
As the designer and developer, I was responsible for creating the brand identity, site architecture, and technical workflows that powered the platform. I created logos and icons in Adobe Illustrator, used a theme (Aardvark by GhostPool) for the user interface design, and built custom WordPress plugins to meet the unique content editing needs of the project managers.
The Solution
Visual Identity& Architecture:
- Designed the project logo to reflect the ecosystem’s collaborative mission
- Created the site architecture to balance informational pages, news updates, and event resources
- Built content update workflows to reduce friction for stakeholders contributing new material
- Designed the project logo to reflect the ecosystem’s collaborative mission
- Created the site architecture to balance informational pages, news updates, and event resources
- Built content update workflows to reduce friction for stakeholders contributing new material
Development & Customization:
- Developed the site in WordPress for ease of content management, theming, and accessibility
- Implemented dynamic sourcing of content from NIH’s GitHub repositories, enabling content creators to submit updates through a pull request system
- Built a custom WordPress plugin to manage and display event calendars tailored to the project’s needs
- Developed the site in WordPress for ease of content management, theming, and accessibility
- Implemented dynamic sourcing of content from NIH’s GitHub repositories, enabling content creators to submit updates through a pull request system
- Built a custom WordPress plugin to manage and display event calendars tailored to the project’s needs
Home page with introductory video and featured content
Contributors page to highlight principal investigators
Later extended to include user search for all registered team members
Resources page with main content sourced directly from GitHub, organized in accordion menu populated by repository file structure
Impact and Expansion
The CFDE community site became the central hub for project stakeholders, providing a consistent source of information, announcements, and collaborative resources. It streamlined communication, reduced redundancy across platforms, and reinforced NIH’s commitment to open science practices.
By pairing a thoughtful design system with custom development, the site supported both immediate community needs and long-term scalability as the CFDE expanded. Once the site was established, I added membership and login features so researchers could access private content and contact info. All membership was managed through WordPress roles.
