We want the university's most visible departments and organizations to be hosted on our Drupal platform. Sites receive the UVM branding and web editors benefit from a weekly lab for in-person support as well as and online documentation. Users of the Drupal templates receive access to any new features that are added to our templates and automatically receive any design changes.

This does not mean that you should have a website on Drupal. Part of our Drupal migration has been a plan to fine-tune and condense all of the many satellite websites that existed in magicscript. UVM has officially moved away from the idea that anyone interested in hosting a website on the main UVM web platform can do so. We're here to help you realize the best way to thoughtfully place your web content where there can be more eyes on it. And it is required that it have an owner and will get updated regularly.

• If you have the need to work in any number of programmatic languages, explore the UVM Silk hosting service. We offer a standalone template that will offer the UVM branding (header-logo-footer) on your silk web space. Contact the web team for more details.
• Build a website on Wordpress.

Personal web presences, small research websites or smaller university initiatives that aren't affiliated with a larger department can be hosted by UVM's blog platform — blog.uvm.edu, which is currently going through a redesign. This is a self-help platform. You can publish your website as quickly as you can build it.

But before you build that website, we have found that many UVM affiliates feel that they need a standalone website when a page or two would actually suffice. There are many opportunities for including your lab or creative work on your department Drupal presence via your faculty profile page or on a dedicated page within your home department Drupal group. By incorporating your work into an existing website, you have the added bonus of all of the visitors to the parent website potentially seeing and learning about your research/lab, you benefit from your home unit's marketing efforts, and you have the support of your trained departmental webmaster.

Regularly, we receive website group requests for a faculty research website that merely repeats all of the content on a faculty profile. In a case like this, one could add the specific projects, students working in the lab, any other relevant information to the faculty profiles themselves and spare the additional webspace. We are also in the process of redesigning and enhancing these profiles.

If you are part of a large central research endeavor or a major research center and have a dedicated web person, Drupal may be the place for your website.

Drupal is not the space for event websites. The turnaround is not fast enough given the training you have to do and the review we have to do. There's also no way that an individual can unpublish a website. We always recommend that when looking for a space in which to share event info, they work with their home department to have a page created for the duration of the event.

All UVM clubs must have a UVM Clubs Lynx presence. In some circumstances, there may be a need for a larger web presence than what the Lynx platform offers. If you feel that your club falls into this category (note that most do not), you can reach out to Cody Silfies (csilfies@uvm.edu) and Efe Cimrin (Efe.Cimrin@uvm.edu) who will work with the Web Team to find the right direction for your club — whether that's a unique Drupal group, or a page within an existing/affiliated Drupal group.

Because of the long-term commitment of obtaining a Drupal group, we cannot issue Drupal groups to students. If it's detemined that a club needs a Drupal group, only faculty and staff mentors can apply for Drupal groups for clubs.

UVM's Silk hosting service, supported by ETS, provides this programmatic flexibility for a variety of web editors. Get started with UVM Silk hosting service. Web editors on Silk usually have some pretty advanced technical skills.

Sharepoint is the university's preferred platform for secure document sharing and collaboration on the web. The platform is self-help, but there is a great deal of education  available to UVM affiliates via Lynda.com.