October 1, 2007 (Vol. 27, No. 17)
URL:
http://homepage.univie.ac.at/herbert.mayer/index.html
Rating:
Strong Points: Awesome collection of links
Weak Points: Needs tidying
Summary:
I don’t even want to think about how much work went into putting this one together. A sprawling collection of links to bioinformatics programs and databases, Bioinformatics World is the product of the efforts of Herbert Mayer. The site’s rather cluttered opening page provides entry to the enormous content of the site that can be broken down into links to bioinformatics-related pages (complete with descriptions) and a sort of tutorial/description of how to perform various analyses. The FAQ pages, which are what the tutorials correspond to, alone span over 120 long pages. The links are alphabetized to keep them somewhat tidy and simplify access. A search engine is available as well. While there are many upsides to this collection, there is one unfortunate downside and that concerns the clutter and poor use of hierarchy. The pages look like a mess and could definitely be better organized. With these improvements, this would be a world class site.
