Creating Your Web Presence
The purpose of this tutorial is to provide you with an overview of the recommended options available at NC State for creating and maintaining a web presence for course information and material, research information, publications, and other pertinent information.
Building your personal web presence has evolved considerably in the past decade. Formerly, you had to do everything yourself, using web design software like Dreamweaver to create the site, and then upload it to a dedicated web server. While free web services such as GeoCities offered a place to host your site, you still had to have at least a rudimentary concept of web design in order to be able to publish it effectively.
Today, however, this is no longer the case. Now you can publish information to the web with very little or even no knowledge of web design whatsoever (for instance, by using an online tool such as Facebook). The list below outlines the recommended options.
Your site must meet NC State brand guidelines. Please refer to this link for information about standards and principles: https://brand.ncsu.edu/. At a minimum, you must include the NC State branding bar. Here is the configuration link: https://brand.ncsu.edu/downloads/#utility-bar.
Faculty and Staff Application
This web-based tool, located at faculty.chass.ncsu.edu, provides a quick way to set up a web presence with commonly used information. This profile page then integrates into many departmental website faculty listings, as is often used by the research office to identify faculty research interests. It is easy-to-use, intuitive, and requires no prior knowledge of web design. You simply enter your information, and with the click of a button, it is published on your faculty profile (under faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/[your Unity ID].
This profile application provides you with the ability to easily post information for students and others, such as your photo, contact information, vitae, location and office hours, biography, research interests, as well as publications, honors, and awards. You also have the option of including your courses, syllabi, and office hours. You can customize how much or how little information is displayed within the profile.
It is highly recommended that the Faculty/Staff app be used as the primary tool in developing your web presence. If you have need of more tools in developing a web presence for your courses, Moodle Learning Management System is the recommended option.
To learn more about the Faculty Profile, and how to use the Faculty/Staff Application, you can view the tutorial here.
Moodle Learning Management System
Moodle is a browser-based LMS, and is an extremely versatile and convenient tool for creating a web presence for your courses at NC State. In addition to creating and maintaining web content for your course, you can also use it as a way for students to submit assignments, for uploading important course files, creating online discussion forums, posting news and announcements, as well as for setting up quizzes and course calendars. As with the Faculty/Staff profile application, no knowledge of web design is required to use Moodle, so managing the website for your courses will be quite straightforward. Using Moodle to manage course material is also convenient for students, as it provides them with a central login portal to securely access all the information on each of their courses, rather than having to navigate to many different websites.
To learn more about Moodle and how to use it to create a course website, as well as how to use its many other features, see the NC State Delta page here.
Google Sites
If you need a separate site for a project you're working on, Google Sites is the recommended tool to use. Once created, the site will be accessible under sites.ncsu.edu. To learn how to build a personal/project website using Google Sites, see the tutorial here.
Traditional Web Design
For those who are familiar with advanced website design principles, the recommended software for this option is the BlueGriffon HTML editor. Once you create and upload your site, it will be accessible at www4.ncsu.edu/~[Your Unity ID]. This option is quite high-maintenance, as well as very time consuming. It is only recommended for those uniquely familiar with web design and/or HTML, as well as FTP uploading. For more on the traditional web design option, please reference the BlueGriffon information page here.