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Website Creation: An exploration of content management platforms: Home

This guide seeks to compare some of the mainstream website content management platforms. Each platform is listed with a list of different features available, available plans, and any other notable information about the tool.

Thinking about building a website?  No fear!  This guide is available to help you easily explore the many options available for creating websites.  A selection of content management platforms are listed in the above tabs.  Each page displays a comparison of information about the tool including the plans/cost and the varying features.  

 

For Questions about this guide or for assistance with creating a website, please contact the Digital Liberal Arts Librarian, Victoria Longfield, longfield@hope.edu.

Digital Liberal Arts Librarian

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Victoria Longfield
Contact:
227 - 2nd floor
Van Wylen Library
616-395-7013
Social: Twitter Page

Tips for Building Good Websites

  1. Make your website mobile-friendly 
  2. Be consistent with language, terms, vocabulary, and navigation throughout the entire site
  3. Make the site user-center by keeping your audience in mind

Getting Started

Choosing a content management platform is greatly dependent upon your content, your technical abilities, and your intended audience.

Here are some questions to help you determine what are the most important components of your website:

  1. What type of information do you need to include on your website? i.e. numerical information, media (videos, audio, etc.), topic based information, etc.
  2. How do you want this information to be organized? By topic, chronologically? 
  3. Who is your audience or user? (your professor, academic audience, students, community, the world?)
  4. How will your user or audience understand the information you want to convey to them? (think about the language you use, how many and what kind of images you'll use, etc.)
  5. Are you hoping to embed something onto the site?  
  6. Do you want to have a video?
  7. Do you want to blog or have others blog? 
  8. Mapping? 
  9. Do you want built in visualization features?  Do you want your platform to be able to create graphs, charts, or beautiful visualizations of some information you have?
  10. Do you want to customize the display to meet your needs? Do you have the technical skills to write HTML, CSS, and/or Javascript to make the platform do what you'd like it to do?

About this Guide

This guide was last updated Fall 2019.  If information seems out of date or other errors please contact the Digital Liberal Arts Librarian, Victoria Longfield at longfield@hope.edu