Web Sites
College Web Sites
The Internet is becoming increasingly important in higher education. Today’s college students routinely go online to accomplish a variety of tasks, such as:
- enrolling in classes
- finding out which classes are available
- communicating with professors
- communicating with students
- obtaining course information (syllabi, homework assignments, etc)
- using library resources
- taking online classes
- looking up stuff
- doing research
- checking calendar of campus events
- blogging and podcasting
- social networking
The college Web site is a focal point of student online activities. Colleges are realizing that quality Web sites are essential for attracting and retaining students and that the costs of supporting these sites are crucial investments.
Open Source Software
The economic downturn has created significant challenges. Many colleges have turned to open source software for affordable Web solutions (it’s free!). Interestingly, open source software offers many features not available in expensive, commercial software packages. With this in mind, the Peralta Community College district is developing Web sites using WordPress open source software.
WordPress Web and Blog software
- empowers faculty, staff, and administrators to have ownership of their own pages
- provides a user-friendly development environment
- allows users without a technical background to develop sophisticated web pages
- provides a wide selection of themes and templates to maintain a common look and feel
- minimizes costs
- makes available a myriad of plug-ins, add-ons, and other development tools through online, open source communities
- avoids the need to deal with expensive, commercial web solutions
- puts faculty on the “same page” as students, providing everyone in the college community with a common development environment
PowerPoint presentation: Peralta Web Sites Update 10-09-09