The website for the Andrechek Lab at Michigan State University, where we study the genomics of breast cancer.
This site is designed so lab members can update it themselves — adding people, publications, news, and datasets by editing simple text files, with no web-design work required. Doing so is also a gentle, real-world introduction to Git and GitHub, the same tools you'll use throughout a research career in bioinformatics.
You don't need to read the whole thing — pick the guide that matches what you want:
| I want to… | Read this |
|---|---|
| Add myself (or a student) to the People page | CONTRIBUTING.md — a complete walkthrough that assumes zero prior experience with Git, the terminal, or coding |
| Add a publication, news item, dataset, or research area | docs/editing-content.md |
| Approve someone's change, or manage the repo | docs/maintainers.md |
| Set up or change hosting, the domain, or downloads | docs/infrastructure.md |
Almost every update follows the same idea: the content lives in plain text files
inside the src/content/ folder, and you change those files. You never have to
touch the design or the code.
src/
content/ ← the content you edit
people/ research/ publications/ news/ datasets/ home/ ← one file per item
pages/ ← the wording on each page (headings, ledes, labels) as YAML
pages/ ← the page templates (the layout/design of each page)
components/ ← reusable pieces (header, footer, slideshow, BlueSky feed)
layouts/ ← the shared page shell (used by every page)
config/site.ts ← the lab's core facts + settings: name, institution, menu, contact, analytics
worker/ ← the Cloudflare Worker that serves the site
scripts/ ← admin helper(s), e.g. generating the social-share image (not needed for content edits)
docs/ ← guides for editing, maintaining, and hosting
.github/ ← the automatic check that runs on every change- Astro turns the content files into a fast, static website. It also automatically shrinks and optimizes every photo, so you can upload a large image and the site still loads quickly.
- Cloudflare Workers hosts the site. Every time a change is merged, the site rebuilds and republishes automatically.
- Large dataset files live on GitHub Releases, not in this repository, so the repo stays small.
- Each page also has a clean markdown version (e.g.
/people.md) that AI assistants and search crawlers can read — handy for a research lab that wants its work found.
You do not need this to add yourself or edit content — but if you'd like to preview changes locally first:
pnpm install # one-time: install the tools (uses pnpm; see note below)
pnpm dev # start a local preview at http://localhost:4321
pnpm validate # run the same check the robot runs on your pull requestTools used: Node.js (v20+) and pnpm. CONTRIBUTING.md walks through installing them.
Site code is maintained by the lab. Research content, images, and text are © the Andrechek Lab, Michigan State University.