Do you need help with Contribute? Can you not access your web site because it was built using Contribute?
We get lots of these types of questions dealing with Contribute everyday. We struggled and continue to struggle with Contribute as well. The keys won’t work. It’s hard to manage. No one ever remembers the netID that was used to set up the web site. The software upgrade skipped a few upgrades and now the web site won’t work with Contribute CS4.
Maybe it’s time to just move on. Contribute was the prime way to get a website built on campus a few years ago but that’s not the case anymore.
AgencyND has built two different platforms that make it easy to get your web site up on the internet.
- Conductor – web content management system
- WordPress Blogs at ND – blogging tool and web content management system
And both of them are controlled by your netID and you don’t need to know HTML to use them. How great is that?
First, we have Conductor. This is our own web content management tool. There are over 200 web sites in Conductor and lots of happy users. It’s a snap to use and is very flexible with design. Gameday.nd.edu, supporting.nd.edu and english.nd.edu were built in this system and they all have very different looks and feels. If you would like a custom web site like these, just contact us at 574-631-1697 or email me.
Now if you don’t have a very big budget, we also offer a low-end professionally designed (four different themes to choose from) web site for only $300. You still get to use Conductor and all of its convenient features. And there are no hosting fees (outside hosting could cost you between $5-$50 a month), one hour of free Conductor training, and you can have a web site up and running in less than a week. You can also have multiple editors for each website. Get your Conductor Do-It-Yourself site here.
We are always adding new features to Conductor as well. If you used Conductor in the past, this is definitely a different system. We just reworked the image management and you can upload photos on the fly. Next on the list is Content Sharing – where you can share posted information across websites (i.e. post a press release on one site and easily share it with another site). We will be using Conductor for a long time so you don’t have to worry about your Content Management System not having support – unlike some CMS’s that have long since disappeared.
Secondly, we have the WordPress Multiple User blogging system. Now a blog doesn’t have to be a blog if you don’t want it to. You can build a simple website, making just one of your static pages as the homepage and the blog can be shut down or just linked to in the navigation.
The wordpress blogs also have more many more themes (14) right now and we’re constantly adding more. There are more than 65 blogs in WordPress on our system. There are more than 25 million bloggers using WordPress worldwide.
The best thing about the blog system is that it is currently FREE.
So why struggle using a website builder and then pushing the information into your WebFile to publish your website in Contribute? There are two other systems that are easier, give you profession design and you can log into using your netID.
BTW, you need to get rid of your tilde ~ as well. Using blogs or Conductor, you will get a search engine friendly URL like http://blogs.nd.edu/social-design or socialdesign.nd.edu. Dropping the ~ makes life better on you, the search engines and the person you are sending to the web site.
What more do you want with your web site here on campus? Please tell us.
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