Lunch & Learn: Jill Moraca on Website options at Princeton University

Lunch & Learn logo

Jill Moraca of Web Devel­op­ment Ser­vices (WDS) at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity talked to the Lunch & Learn crowd about the var­i­ous options offered to the Prince­ton com­mu­nity for cre­at­ing web­sites. She explained that the con­ver­sa­tion usu­ally starts with the idea that the options avail­able to you depend on who you are (e.g. indi­vid­ual, group, or project), what your spe­cific needs are (e.g. how much sup­port you need and how development-savvy you are), and how much you have in your spend­ing bud­get (e.g. no bud­get, some money set aside, or a ded­i­cated bud­get for the effort) for the site’s cre­ation, devel­op­ment, and maintenance.

Jill Moraca

Moraca begins by assess­ing a customer’s spe­cific needs and their audience’s needs by ask­ing ques­tions such as:

• How much time can you devote to your website?
• What con­tent do you have or need to have for the site?
• Do you have the tech­ni­cal skills to update and patch the website?
• What are your goals and out­comes for the site?
• Who will read the site?
• What are they look­ing for?
• What do they need to do?

When devel­op­ing offi­cial sites that rep­re­sent the Uni­ver­sity and its var­i­ous depart­ments, Moraca always makes peo­ple aware that there are spe­cific IT secu­rity and usage poli­cies, require­ments and rec­om­men­da­tions (http://www.princeton.edu/itpolicy) such as those that pre­vent the sell­ing of items, biased or polit­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion, and so on. The Office of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions has its own set of required ele­ments, such as site owner con­tact infor­ma­tion, and highly sug­gested fea­tures, such as  the promi­nent pres­ence of your site’s title on every page (http://www.princeton.edu/communications/services/web/launch/requirements/).

Moraca noted that there are now 8 options for pub­lish­ing at Prince­ton, shown here in this handy chart from her slide deck:

Moraca described the options in some detail, orga­niz­ing the options accord­ing to those avail­able for indi­vid­u­als, indi­vid­u­als & groups, and groups only.

Indi­vid­ual options:

Google sites for stu­dents inte­grates with Google Apps, cal­en­dar­ing, blogs, and is tem­plated, quick, easy to use, and has a point-and-click inter­face. OIT pro­vides some light sup­port, and the ser­vice is free to stu­dents. There is no fee-based cus­tomiza­tion for this ser­vice. http://www.princeton.edu/studentapps/google-apps/

Open Scholar is avail­able for fac­ulty, researchers and grad stu­dents who want to have a pro­fes­sional online pres­ence with CV options. It is tem­plated, quick to edit, easy to use, offers a point and click inter­face, and offers biog­ra­phy, pub­li­ca­tion and bib­li­og­ra­phy infor­ma­tion, cal­en­dar­ing, classes, and more. It is sup­ported, man­aged, patched, and secured by OIT. It is not very cus­tomiz­able, and there is a 2 GB quota. http://www.princeton.edu/etc/services/openscholar/

For indi­vid­u­als and groups:

Share­Point is avail­able for fac­ulty, staff and groups. It is tem­plated, and best used for shar­ing infor­ma­tion and doc­u­ments. At Prince­ton, it is typ­i­cally used as an intranet for inter­nal, pro­tected shar­ing, and not as a world-facing site. NetID is required for cre­ation, but guest access is avail­able. It is well sup­ported, and users can get train­ing. It is free, and there is no cus­tomiza­tion avail­able. http://helpdesk.princeton.edu/kb/display.plx?ID=5286

cPanel is avail­able to depart­ments, pro­grams, cen­ters, labs, and indi­vid­u­als. It pri­mar­ily pro­vides a LAMP-based (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) envi­ron­ment for build­ing appli­ca­tions, but also offers Scrip­tac­u­lous, which allows for quick, one-click  installs of pop­u­lar pack­ages such as Word­Press for low-bandwidth access by the world. Sup­port is lim­ited, and the user builds and secures the site them­selves. It is free and has a 2 GB quota. More infor­ma­tion is avail­able at http://helpdesk.princeton.edu/kb/display.plx?ID=9807

Word­Press is avail­able to depart­ments, groups rec­og­nized by the Office of the Dean of Under­grad­u­ate Stu­dents (ODUS), and fac­ulty. Word­Press is a blog-based web con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem. OIT offers vet­ted tem­plates and plu­g­ins and lim­ited sup­port is avail­able. Patch­ing and updates are done by OIT, and the ETC offers spe­cific sup­port for fac­ulty use in courses. It is free and comes with a 250 MB quota. It is avail­able at http://blogs.princeton.edu

Only for groups:

Roxen is avail­able to depart­ments, pro­grams, cen­ters, and labs, but not indi­vid­u­als. Open scholar is a good alter­na­tive for those indi­vid­u­als look­ing for per­sonal pub­lish­ing. Roxen is a Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem (CMS), mean­ing that for users, no knowl­edge of code is nec­es­sary to cre­ate or edit a site. Tem­plates and cus­tomiz­abil­ity, as well as many func­tion­al­ity mod­ules  (e.g. direc­tory list­ings, news items, etc.) are avail­able. It is highly mon­i­tored, and train­ing is avail­able. OIT offers cus­tomiza­tion for Roxen in a few lev­els of ser­vice: free, (a stan­dard tem­plate), low-cost, (some tweaks to CSS), and fully cus­tomized, (a group builds the site from scratch with full sup­port and help from OIT). Doc­u­men­ta­tion, train­ing, and a vari­ety of themes are avail­able. It’s hosted, patched, and updated by OIT http://www.princeton.edu/roxen

Finally, Dru­pal is sim­i­lar to Roxen, but far more cus­tomiz­able. It is also very well sup­ported by OIT, with 24/7 mon­i­tor­ing, per-site train­ing, with OIT man­ag­ing all patches and upgrades. If you decide you want cus­tomiza­tion, there is a $50/hour rate for help. A recent pilot of Dru­pal has ended suc­cess­fully, and OIT is launch­ing production-ready sites. http://www.princeton.edu/wds

For more infor­ma­tion or to get started with your web­site at Prince­ton, please con­tact Jill Moraca at , or visit http://www.princeton.edu/wds

Below is the pre­sen­ta­tion and video from Moraca’s session.

20121128_moraca Pow­er­point file

Video Man­age­ment, Video Host­ing, Video Stream­ing, Video Plat­form