If you're thinking about building a website, there are three key things to consider: the publishing tool you'll use, the hosting service, and the degree of customization you need. Publishing tools are programs that help you build and manage the content of your website. A hosting service stores your website and makes it available to readers via the internet. Keep in mind that websites that require customization will also require more technical skills to create, more attention to accessibility features, more time and labor to build, and more effort to maintain.

Below is a list of commonly used publishing tools and hosting options for specific types of academic projects.

All websites built for university purposes must meet Title II Accessibility requirements. This law mandates that websites should have features that support screen-readers and navigating by tab. These include a high degree of contrast between the color of the text and the background, images with alt-text that describe their context, and properly nested headings. Some commonly used accessibility tools and resources are listed below. 

If you are building a website to share your personal research, you can use University resources to host your site, look for options from the makers of a specific publishing tool, or pay for a private hosting service. University-sponsored options are available to you while you are affiliated with the University. If you graduate or change institutions, you will need to move the site to another host in order to maintain it. You can add collaborators from outside the University to these sites using a gmail address, but the website's owner will need to have an affiliation with the University of Illinois. Below is a list of University-based and commercial hosting options. 

Building websites as a final assignment can offer students an opportunity to present and analyze multimedia in a seamless environment. These can be individual contributions to a website for the course, co-authored sites built by groups, or individual webpages. If you'd like help designing multimodal writing assignments or assistance teaching a particular digital publishing tool, please contact Scholarly Communication and Publishing. 

Below are hosting options that support multiple editors contributing to one site. 

The Illinois Open Publishing Network (IOPN or "eye-open") is a set of digital publishing initiatives that are hosted and coordinated at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library. IOPN offers a suite of publishing services to members of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign community and beyond. We aim to facilitate the dissemination of high-quality, open access scholarly publications. Our services include infrastructure and support for publishing open access journals, monographs, born-digital projects that integrate multimedia and interactive content. To request a consultation, please visit our home page. 

Other academic publishers may offer options for building digital companion sites or digital versions of your monograph. Check with your publisher to see what tools and services are available. 

The Library uses OmekaS to highlight our vast archival and special collections through curated digital exhibits. These exhibits provide an accessible and engaging way to explore manuscripts, photos, and other materials, ranging from the original Star Wars script to our player piano. We use the KSharp theme to organize smaller exhibits by unit. These exhibits tend to include curated collections of 10-20 items and are built over the course of a semester or year by Library workers. Larger collections, multi-unit collaborations, and longer-term projects can request their own site. All new Library OmekaS users are required to complete a brief training course in our sandbox site before joining their unit’s production site.

To request access for a new user, help setting up a new site, or troubleshooting Library Digital Exhibits, please contact Scholarly Communication and Publishing at scpub@library.illinois.edu.