Technology Advisory Group

TAG has heard some renewed concern and confusion about faculty websites lately, so we thought it might be a good time to revisit the available options and outline how faculty members can take advantage of them.

When building a personal website (not a departmental website), faculty have several options with varying levels of control and support:

1. Use the Content Management System (CMS) and build off of your department’s page.

• You can choose to build a personal faculty website as an offshoot of your department’s page.
• Faculty pages using this option must use the standard CMS templates (that is, the page will look like all of the other University pages).
• An example is TAG member Dave Dzurec’s page off of the History Department website.
• This option offers the least amount of design control, but it can be done pretty quickly.
• To request a page like this, talk with your department’s webmaster.

2. Use the Content Management System (CMS) and build your own site.

• You can choose to build an independent (that is, not an offshoot of your department’s page) personal faculty website within the CMS .
• With this option, you’d store your page content within the CMS, but you are not required to use a standard University template – so your site doesn’t have to look like the rest of the University pages.
• The CTLE offers two templates (basic and advanced) that you can use as a starting point, but both are completely editable either by the faculty member him/herself or with the help of a CTLE TechCon. So you can change colors, add features, etc. Note that neither template is branded with  University of Scranton colors or logos.  As an example, I made a demo page by tweaking the advanced template.
• You can also choose to design your own site from scratch by copy/pasting HTML from a web design tool (like Dreamweaver) into the CMS. This choice gives you more control over the page design.
• To request space on the CMS, simply contact Aileen McHale at the CTLE. The CTLE TechCons will set up your web space, and if you like, they can also help you build and edit the pages – just let Aileen know how much help you think you will need.

3. Use third party services to design and/or host your site.

• Faculty members can also feel free to use non-University tools to build and/or host a website.
• Some tools to explore: Google Sites, portal sites like flavors.me or about.me (librarian Sheli McHugh has a nice about.me page), WordPress, Square Space…
• This option gives you complete control over your website’s design.

In all cases, faculty members have complete control over their site’s content. PR and CTLE don’t have any control over the text, images, documents, and links you post.  All that is expected is that you follow the University’s Code of Responsible Computing.  Also in all cases, it’s the faculty member’s responsibility to keep their page up-to-date.

If you have questions or concerns about faculty websites, or if you want to share recommendations for third party web design/hosting tools, please let us know!

Many thanks to PR and the CTLE for helping us work out a user-friendly workflow for faculty websites in the CMS.