Go to sites.iastate.edu, log in with your ISU NetID, and follow the instructions. Or, follow along with our Quick Start Guide.

See this handy comparison table.

No. If you have a profile page on your department or unit site and it is enough to serve your needs, it is not necessary to make a site.

Currently, ISU Sites is for faculty members only. Most staff already have a presence on the website of the ISU unit they serve. If you are a staff member, please ask your local IT support group what options are available for you. If you need a website and are in CALS or LAS, please contact the web team at websupport@iastate.edu to see if you need our Sites+ option.

If you are a graduate student or postdoc and the faculty member you are associated with has a site, the faculty member may delegate permissions for you to edit your Profile page on their site. It is to your advantage to have your information on a faculty member's site, as it gives you more exposure, includes your information in search results, and provides context for your role at the university.

If you are a student who is looking for a platform to showcase your work, a platform like Github (for more technical majors) or LinkedIn may be a good choice.

See our complete tutorial: Edit your Homepage Profile

If you choose to create an Advanced or Full-Scale website, you can give access and assign permissions to trusted people.

Every site comes with built-in website traffic analytics.

Sure! You can set that up with a few clicks by following the steps on Make a Dashboard App to log in. This is handy but optional; you can always log in to your site by going to sites.iastate.edu/login.

Because of the way the World Wide Web works, standard copy and paste will not work to move images and files to your new website (though copy and paste will work fine for text). Take a look at the fixing pasted images and files tutorial, which explains how to move images and files to your new website, how to tell if your images and files will break, and how to fix them.

Current research indicates that it is not good practice to open links in a new tab.

1. Opening a new tab or window is actually an unexpected behavior for most people. Browsers are built with the ability to right-click on a link to open it in a new tab. When a link auto-opens a new tab without being told to, that is an unexpected behavior. Essentially, the action requires taking over the functionality of one's web browser, which feels to many people like someone grabbing the steering wheel while you are driving.
2. Security purposes. The link code that opens in a new window is vulnerable to being hijacked; this is a longstanding vulnerability in web browsers.
3. Users with accessibility issues who are using screen readers, screen magnifiers, and users with certain cognitive impairments can become disoriented when they are taken to a new window.
4. Opening in a new tab or window disables the Back button in the browser. People expect to be able to use their back button to go back (in this case, back to your site!).

Usability and accessibility best practices discourage forcing links to open in new tabs; instead, allow the user to open the link in a new tab only if they want to.

Absolutely. Contact datashare@iastate.edu to find out how to use DataShare, Iowa State University's open research data repository. Once the data set is published on DataShare, you can simply link to it from your site.

public.iastate.edu gave faculty and staff members of ISU the ability to create and edit their own website, but over time, the service was phased out as better tools and practices became available. The closing of the service was initially publicized for May 2019, but was delayed to May 2020 to allow users to move their content to another service. Read more about the closure of public.iastate.edu here. As of May 31, 2020, public.iastate.edu and all of the sites within are no longer available. Faculty members who need to create a new website should use the platform at sites.iastate.edu.

ISU Sites launched on November 15, 2018, as a project of the ISU IT Leadership Committee (ITLC).

If you need help using ISU Sites or Sites+, or if you have feedback to share, please contact websupport@iastate.edu.