Dr. Martin Lea

I was an academic researcher before starting my Academic Web Design business in 2013. I build WordPress websites exclusively for researchers, authors, educators, and therapists. View my Portolio or read my Guides to creating an academic website.

Ruth’s Author Website

Ruth’s an investigative journalist. She wanted a website to promote her latest book and film projects, and also present an archive of her published articles. We chose a strong, clean style, and a structure for all her work that was easy to browse.

Sandra’s Personal Academic Website

Sandra’s a psychology professor. She wanted a personal academic website to present her outreach activities alongside her research and publications. We chose a bold, magazine style design that headlined her latest activities, and presented a news blog of her work.

Len’s Therapist Website

Len wanted a website to provide information about his personal counselling service, and a way for potential clients to contact him easily. It was important to keep the design clean, light, and easy to use, and the project within his limited budget.

Carola’s Book Website

Carola wanted a website to publicise her first published book, and sell it directly through her website. We designed her site around the artwork she had commissioned for her book cover. We included several elements to inform about the book, including a video trailer, sample downloadable chapter, and reviews.

Project Outreach Website

This is an example of a website emanating from a research project that was built to provide information for end users. In this text-heavy site we use plenty of white space to lighten the experience. The home page displays the different categories of information available, together with a prominent newsletter opt-in form, and a disclaimer.

Website Managed Hosting and Site Care

Ruth Yeoman already had a personal academic website, but she wanted someone who understood her professional needs to look after all the technical aspects of hosting and maintaining her site, and at an affordable price. Read what I did, as well as full details of my Site Care plans.

How to Choose a Domain Name for your Personal Academic Website

It’s important to choose the right domain name for your personal academic website because it’s the first thing potential visitors find out about your website, as well as being the means to remember how to revisit your website. In this article I’m going to give you some guidelines for deciding on the right domain name … Read more

Book Launch Event Website

This was an urgent project for a book launch and author website. Working with the client over email and phone, we completed the project in a day. Includes links to order the book, details of the Launch event on Zoom – including a useful countdown timer, descriptions of the book and the author, book reviews, and a registration form for the event.

How to Choose a Theme for your Academic Website

Which theme should you use for your academic website? I used Genesis for many years. It was the foremost theme framework for designers and developers – very lean and well-coded to high standards. But it was definitely a developer-centric framework, meaning that you needed a developer to customise it, unless you knew CSS and PHP. … Read more

How to Choose Images for Your Academic Website

What kind of images should I use on my academic website? How you use images is something to consider in planning your website and will affect the look and feel of your website. Images on academic websites can serve a variety of functions. The two most useful types of images to display on an academic … Read more

Community Response to Disaster

This article discusses the longer term impact that an incident may have on the affected community, the mechanisms by which the community recovers, and factors affecting successful recovery. The literature suggests that in contrast to the immediate social response, the long term community response to disaster may be more negative, characterised by community conflicts, stigmatisation of … Read more

The Public as First Responders

First Responders comprise not only officials and professionals from the various emergency services, disaster agencies, local authority and health services, but also the general public (Clark, 2003). In fact some reports suggest that in many disasters, the public makes up a numerically larger proportion of first responders, assisting with rescue work and elementary disaster relief … Read more

How to integrate Restrict Content Pro with ConvertKit

ConvertKit is a simple to use but powerful email marketing sytem for professional bloggers. Restrict Content Pro is a membership plugin that makes it extremely easy to deliver premium content to your subscribers. Together they provide a really straightforward foundation for a membership site. Here’s how to integrate them. As a Restrict Content Pro user I’m … Read more

How to integrate Contact Form 7 with ConvertKit

ConvertKit is a new, powerful and incredibly easy to use email marketing service for professional bloggers. Contact Form 7 is actively installed in over 1 million WordPress blogs and websites. Here’s how to integrate CF7 with ConvertKit, so that the sender is automatically subscribed to a ConvertKit Form when they send you a contact email. It’s very simple … Read more

How to integrate Ninja Forms with ConvertKit

If you run one of the half a million websites that have Ninja Forms installed you may be wondering if  there’s a way to integrate your form with ConvertKit, the new, powerful and very intuitive marketing email service provider for professional bloggers. Connecting Ninja Forms with ConvertKit is simple and only takes a few minutes to set up using a free … Read more

Public Response to Disaster Warnings

This article addresses the factors that affect the public response to a warning message and the processes that individuals are likely to go through before responding. These factors include obtaining confirmation of the warning from alternative sources; contacting friends and family; individual recipient characteristics; and features of the message itself (e.g. clarity, consistency). Individuals are … Read more