What’s in a Website? Navigating web development as a student team.

Written and researched by Maddy Casey
Edited by Claudia Berger

Special thanks to Monica Maceli and Chris Alen Sula for their insights, time and assistance.

Initially written October 8, 2024

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Hello! My name is Maddy- I am a MsLIS (Masters of Science in Library and Information Science) student at Pratt.  As part of my contribution to this project, I am working on building a website that will host all of the work that my peers are doing. I am also documenting some of the challenges and decisions our team is making through this process blog.  

The Goal

In order to make digital content available to a public audience, a project should most likely have a website.  However, as I quickly discovered in library school, the process of coding and hosting a multi-page, well-formatted website is more complicated than typing content into a document and ~manifesting~.  Going into this project, I did not have extensive experience with utilizing any particular popular content management systems or resources for site development, but am comfortable with coding basic websites in HTML and CSS.

The research

In order to make an informed decision about how and where to host our project’s website, I dove into research, and spoke to two faculty members at our institution about web hosting and Pratt’s WordPress installation. NYU’s Digital Humanities libguide  was also helpful in better understanding the difference between a static and a dynamic website, and how our choice in web hosting platform would influence our project.  

For brevity, I will not dive into the differences or the mechanics of web hosting here, given the plethora of posts and resources about the process.  Rather, I will focus on the factors that influenced our decisions. However, I did have two important takeaways from the research:

1. Ultimately, the choice any organization makes about website hosting will significantly influence the sustainability, security, and user interface of its project. 
2. If you do conduct your own research into dynamic v. static sites, it is important to note that the terms “dynamic site” and “static site” are applied to a number of different factors about how a website is hosted and designed. For example, “dynamic site” may refer to:
   1. a site which is configured to be regularly updated with new content, as opposed to largely remaining the same every time it is visited.
   2. a site which responds to user inputs or interactions.
   3. technologies on the “server side” which dynamically retrieves content from a database into a template 

The Challenge

As I researched the process and requirements for making a website available, several of the constraints we are facing for this project became quickly apparent:

1. As a group of students working on this project for a semester-long class, we don’t have a budget for registering a domain name and hosting the site on a long term basis.  Personally, I have no plans to put my graduate student salary towards hosting a website, thus choosing an option wherein our institution has an existing framework in place to support site hosting makes the most sense.  
2. As graduate students, we will also be moving on to new jobs, classes, and institutions in the near future.  Thus if we want the site to be available beyond the next six months or so, the labor of maintaining the site (ensuring updates and patches are installed to the software Pratt uses to host the site, confirming that dynamic pages still function properly), needs to be outsourced to someone else, ideally through an existing framework which will not overburden any other institutional staff’s time.
3. As a graduate student, I also have significant time constraints that will influence my ability to devote hours of time to building a usable and engaging site from scratch.

Fortunately, my conversations with university staff made clear that the School of Information at Pratt already has an infrastructure in place that can help us address these challenges! Pratt’s School of Information uses a self-hosted WordPress installation.  They pay to host student work on the site, and have a workflow in place to run regular updates across the hosted WordPress sites.  

For context, WordPress as a platform is an open source and community driven Content Management System (CMS). It stores the information for our website in a database and retrieves it (extremely rapidly) anytime someone navigates to the site.

Reasons in support of using Pratt SI’s WordPress site: 

• A dynamic website, such as a WordPress site, which is not regularly updated to address bugs can become very vulnerable to hacking over time.  However, the fact that School of Information staff regularly update student WorkPress sites with patches/modifications helps alleviate some of the security concerns that would otherwise impact our site.
• Using a WordPress site will allow multiple members of our team to author and update content, even those members who do not have significant web development experience.
• Significantly, our project also does not plan to work with or make public any Personally Identifiable Information (PII): information such as individual phone numbers, addresses, social security numbers, or financial information which could be used to harm, harass, or embarass them should that information become publicly available.  If our project did plan to use sensitive data, we would likely need to consider additional layers of server security. 
• In the field of digital humanities, many projects choose to host their website using a CMS such as WordPress, due to the relatively low degree of required technical expertise to build a site.  Thus, working with WordPress to build our site will be valuable from a professional development perspective!

Reasons against using Pratt SI’s WordPress site:

• Over time, if the software that hosts our site is not maintained or migrated, then the site could potentially be vulnerable to security issues.  
• Additionally, if we use particular plug-ins or styling which do not conform to future updates, particularly interactive or stylized components of the site, the project may undergo breakages and no longer “work” the way we want it to.  However, this is true of all websites- over time all web projects require attention and care to conform to evolving best practices and updates.  Thus, for the purposes of our project, the site will still be able to highlight and facilitate search of the Center for Book Arts’ work and collections in the short-term. 

So long-story short, here we are, on a website hosted on Pratt’s WordPress installation.

Takeaways

Ultimately, the web-hosting decision any project will make should reflect the resources, staff expertise, and goals of the specific context.  The following questions helped guide our decision making process, and may prove helpful to other groups navigating the same process:

1. Do we have a budget to host the site and register the domain name?
2. Who will maintain the site long-term?
3. How easy will it be for our team to update content, based on our current skill sets?
4. How easy will the site be to maintain after the project has concluded?
5. What institutional norms, practices or resources might inform our decision?

And most importantly…

6. Who can I speak to at my institution or in my network who can offer expertise related to my project’s specific context?

What’s Next?

The next important stage of the key decision making process for our website lies in how I will build and design the pages of our site.  Even amongst WordPress sites, the decisions we make about styling, plug-ins, and dynamic site features such as search will influence the degree of sustainability of the site.  There are a number of considerations we will take into account when building out our site.  Our goal is to create a website that is easy to navigate on a phone or computer, accessible to viewers who are neurodiverse or have disabilities, and visually appealing.  

Explore more of Maddy’s Work