New service for faculty: 'ucdavis.edu' WordPress websites

UC Davis faculty who want their own website, where they can publicly display their work and interests beyond what a departmental website might offer, have a new option on campus: Sites that use WordPress and include "ucdavis.edu" in the domain name. The service comes at no charge to faculty.

These sites are now available as part of the IET Faculty Website Network. The Academic Technology Services unit of Information and Educational Technology began offering the service on May 1.

"There are many reasons why a faculty member might want a WordPress site," wrote Mary Stewart in The Wheel instructional technology blog last year, after a few faculty members and ATS tested the service in a pilot phase:

  • The sites display well on smartphones.
  • "You can take advantage of the social media energy on campus (e.g., students can engage with each other via Twitter and you can easily import the feed to your class website)."
  • "Publishing to a public page allows you to share your course information and research with a wider community."
  • The sites have themes that are varied and easy to update.

The sites are free of advertising and can be set up in under a minute, said ATS programmer Simon Dvorak. The default name for each individual site is "(user's CAS ID).faculty.ucdavis.edu," but faculty members may change the site subdomain name to whatever they would like, such as "name.faculty.ucdavis.edu" or "namelab.faculty.ucdavis.edu."

The sites are available to any of the approximately 6,000 faculty, including adjuncts, at UC Davis. For an overview, plus support documents, examples, the terms of use, and more, please see the IT Service Catalog entry and service website.

ATS has scheduled training sessions on the second Friday of each month, from 2 to 4:30 p.m. in Surge III 1310, through October.

Send questions or comments to Charlie Turner, who leads ATS' Academic and Research Programming unit, at cjturner@ucdavis.edu, or use the IET Faculty Website Network\031s contact form.