The first version of the website of our group dates back to February 1997, when Maeno-san was an associate professor under full professor Takehiko Ishiguro. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, we can admire the simple retro look that the website had. The homepage featured the group members on a white background. No colours, no images, mainly emails and room numbers. There was already an English version, to be accessed by clicking a link. From this we can also learn where the “ss.” on the address of our website comes from: the group name in English was “Solid State Laboratory“.
In January 1999 the first changes in style occurred: some background colour appeared in the members table. Also, the default page was in English language! Not much more information, possibly dictated by the slow speed of internet connections in those days.
Maeno-san as group leader
The next big change occurred around January 2003, when the website acquired a new look and, finally, some images! Single crystals of Sr2RuO4 where featured on the main page, showcasing the signature material of our research group. Around those times Maeno-san took the lead of the lab as a full professor, with Ishida-san (back then) associate professor.
In February 2006 the homepage was announcing a change of the group name to the current “Quantum Materials Laboratory“. The homepage featured some higher quality graphics and some styling of the text appeared. Once again, the main page was fully in English!
The legacy design
A radical change occurred in 2009, when the website gained both css and javascript. Mainly thanks to the work of Yonezawa-san, the homepage featured an interactive menu, characteristic colours, and several pages of content. Also, a “Quantum Materials” logo saw its first appearance. A list of news from the lab started being compiled, mostly in Japanese language.
From that moment, the website look persisted for the past 11 years. Same colours, same design, same menus, while much more content started piling up. The banner of several grants won by the QM members filled up the left edge, bringing the homepage menu down to the second page. There was a lot of content, even if a bit difficult to access. Unfortunately, upon clicking “switch to English” more than 80% of this content would disappear. It was clear that we desperately needed a redesign.
The new QM website
In 2020, we finally decided to switch from pure HTML to a more modern system based on Php+MySQL. After several months of testing (and mostly thanks to the stubbornness of Giordano), our new website is finally live! Some of the new exciting features include:
- news organised in categories (i.e., publications, social events, etc.) and showcased in a slider
- an interactive members page, with standardised photos and dynamic personal pages
- automatic detection of the preferred language (Japanese/English)
- an organised list of publications
- searchable content through the appropriate form
- a private section containing the schedule of our group events and more resources
- a new clean and shorter address https://ss.scphys.kyoto-u.ac.jp (forget the “www.”, “contents”, “index”, etc.)
For the nostalgic, our previous website remains fully accessible at the Legacy Website link (also present in the top menu).
From September 2002 we had more than 200,000 visitors. Now the counter restarts from 0, but we are looking forward to receiving much more visits in the coming times! Please enjoy the new QM website with us and happy science to everybody!
