Article

Professor goes far afield to help others with Web sites

He's built program to create sites easily and cheaply

Thursday, October 26, 2006

BY JENNY RODE

News Business Reporter

Professor Jonathan Maybaum has been a cancer drug researcher for more than 20 years at the University of Michigan.

What the 52-year-old Ann Arbor resident is best known for on campus has nothing to do with his academic area of study.

He is the primary architect of SiteMaker, a program that lets people create and maintain Web sites without having to know technical Web language like Java and HTML.

He's worked for the past nine years on the product, which is in its 11th version and has been used to build nearly 6,000 Web sites.

"Most people aren't programmers, and they don't want to be,'' Maybaum said. "... There are a lot of people in between who have different levels of sophistication who could do a lot if given the appropriate tool.''

SiteMaker was developed as a proprietary product by U-M and Global Village Consulting, a Web application company. It was open-sourced last year, meaning that it is available free to the public and can be adapted to fit a user's needs.

Since its inception, use of SiteMaker has grown each year and expanded beyond campus to a couple of Michigan school districts, including Ann Arbor Public Schools.

The creation of thousands of SiteMaker Web sites is one tribute to its success. Another is recognition from "Campus Technology,'' a monthly trade magazine that honored SiteMaker with a 2006 Campus Technology Innovators award.

Maybaum didn't have SiteMaker on his agenda when he became academic information technology director for the medical school in 1998. He talked to colleagues in as many departments as he could, asking what could be done - without a lot of money - to improve information technology.

"It was individual Web sites and databases that I heard most about,'' Maybaum said.

Early on, he wanted users of SiteMaker to lead its development so it would strike the right balance between techies and nontechies. "We had to make it easy enough so unsophisticated people can use it, but powerful enough so advanced users can do what they need to do,'' he said.

For the past several years, Maybaum hasn't been paid by the university for time spent on SiteMaker. When the product was proprietary, Maybaum received a share of royalties from the contract with Global Village. He declined to say how much he earned.

What pleases him is how the product is being used, such as an engineering student at U-M using SiteMaker for a class assignment to build a working prototype of a roommate-matching service.

A faculty member at a university in New York needed to develop a Web database for a grant application. Three vendor estimates showed it would cost about $30,000; Maybaum created the database in about a day with SiteMaker.

Liz Wilson, Web project manager in the University of Michigan Medical School's Department of Family Medicine, has been teaching faculty to use SiteMaker for online teaching modules. Without SiteMaker, she said, faculty members would have to be technology wizards to use Web sites as a teaching tool.

"Before, you had to understand everything about HTML, where to put things, where the servers are - it's so complex,'' she said. "... The faculty I'm working with are really excited about learning this because SiteMaker puts this kind of work within their grasp. If you had to learn HTML, it would be too much of a time burden. This is so much simpler.''

It's also helping faculty keep up with student demands, Wilson said.

"The students, they really have that expectation and they don't balk at the idea of going to a Web site to get their information,'' she said. "The younger (physician) residents coming in are very enthusiastic about this kind of learning.''

Maybaum acknowledged that without the protection of tenure at U-M, it would have been difficult for him to pursue the project. He said that tenure did exactly what it was supposed to do: "It allowed me to go off and do something creative and risky and not feel like I was going to get fired if it didn't work out.''

How did a cancer researcher end up being the guru of a computer program?

His undergraduate education at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received degrees in chemistry and biology, helped. "My major wasn't computing, but you don't get through MIT without having some of that in your blood,'' he said. "So that may be where some of this came from.''

He has made a product that lets people do creative work without having to spend a lot of money and resources, and he likes that.

"I grew up, I wouldn't say we were poor, but in a crowded apartment in Newark, N.J.,'' said Maybaum, whose first couple of jobs included delivering newspapers and stocking shelves at an A&P grocery store. "Neither parent went to college, and dad didn't finish high school. We had to make do with little and be self-reliant, and I value that quite a bit.''

Thousands of published Web sites later, Maybaum, who has a Ph.D. in pharmaceutical chemistry, seems at ease with what he has accomplished with SiteMaker. There was a time though, when he wanted to be known for his "real'' job at the university.

"The culture of scientists is, 'What grant have you gotten lately?' and, 'What journal have you been published in?''' he said. "Doing something, the entire point of which is to help other people, is not necessarily a productive thing, at least by those standards. But SiteMaker is the most successful thing I've done. ... It's taken me a long time to be comfortable saying that, but it's the truth and there's no getting around it.''

Copyright 2006, The Ann Arbor News. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.