A research poster website: the page behind the QR code
A poster session gives you a few minutes with each visitor and none with the people who pass by while you're away. A companion page behind a QR code carries the rest: the key finding in a sentence, the full figures, methods in more detail, references, the paper or preprint and how to reach you. Make it load fast on a phone in a crowded hall.
What the page has to do in thirty seconds
Someone scans the code while standing in an aisle, holding a coffee. The page has to confirm they've got the right poster, give them the finding, and offer the one or two next steps they're likely to take: read the paper later, or contact you. Everything else is for the evening, when they look through the photos on their phone and try to remember why your work mattered.
- Title, authors and the conference, matching the poster exactly, so the scan feels right.
- The finding in one sentence, then two or three bullet points of support.
- Figures at full resolution, which the printed poster can't show in detail, each with a caption that states the result.
- Methods in brief, a paragraph more than the poster allowed.
- References, complete, since posters often squeeze them into tiny type.
- The paper, preprint or data, as links.
- Contact: your email or a form, and your profile pages.
The QR code itself
Generate the QR code with any QR tool, pointing at the page's address, and test it from a metre or two away with more than one phone before printing. A code that only scans up close is useless at a poster session. Place it where people can reach it without leaning over your shoulder, often bottom right, with a short line beside it such as "Figures, references and the paper" so people know why to scan. Anticode doesn't make the code; it gives you the address to point it at.
Use an address that will keep working after the conference, because people scan photos of posters weeks later. A short custom domain on a paid plan, or a stable anticode.dev address, both work; avoid a link shortener that may expire. The QR code landing page covers QR pages for other uses.
Built for a phone in a busy hall
Conference Wi-Fi is famously poor, so weight matters. Pages from Anticode's design engine are plain HTML and CSS with no scripts, and the design gate won't publish a page without a phone viewport, alt text on images or visible keyboard focus. Export figures as compressed images rather than huge originals; a figure that takes twenty seconds on a weak signal won't be seen. Write alt text that states what each figure shows, which also helps anyone using a screen reader.
Building it
Describe it: "a companion page for my poster at the 2027 ecology meeting, with the key finding, four figures, methods, references, a preprint link and contact". Upload the figures and, if you like, a photo of the poster itself. Swiss (Inter Tight) and Technical (IBM Plex Sans) suit scientific content; keep the action colour close to your poster's accent so the two feel connected. Publish a day or two before you print, scan the code from the printed proof, and fix anything that looks wrong on a phone.
After the conference, the same page can become part of a fuller academic website: add the poster as one entry among your talks and papers. If you're presenting a full thesis, see the thesis project website page.
Mistakes to avoid
- Linking the QR code to a generic lab homepage, where visitors have to hunt for your poster.
- A page that just shows the whole poster as one image, which is unreadable on a phone.
- Unpublished results you'd rather not have shared beyond the room; a page is public and can be found.
- Forgetting co-authors or funders that the poster acknowledges.
Limits
- No QR generator. Use any QR tool and point it at your page.
- No PDF download of the poster from the page. Forms and media don't host documents; link to the poster PDF in a repository or archive.
- No embedded videos or interactive plots from other sites. Link to them; or build an interactive figure as a separate app, which runs with sample or entered data and no network.
- No scan tracking per poster. The dashboard counts page views per day by source; scans show as views, not as a separate count.
Questions people ask
How big should the QR code be on a poster?
Big enough to scan from where people stand; test it from that distance with a few phones. Avoid placing it on a busy background.
Can I update the page after printing?
Yes. The QR code points at the address, so you can correct a figure or add the published paper later without reprinting.
Should the page include the full poster image?
As an extra, at the bottom, if you like. The main content should be text and individual figures that read on a phone.