At Canisius College, we have access to a powerful blogging and web development toolset called WordPress. Canisius ITS maintains a WordPress site, where faculty, staff, offices, student groups, and other College organizations can build and maintain beautiful and functional web spaces. WordPress is a sophisticated resource that powers a big portion of the internet, and is widely respected by web developers for its ease of use, flexibility, reliability, and customization possibilities. Canisius’s WordPress edition is augmented by the Divi Theme, a set of tools that allow us a broad range of design options.
A centerpiece of a WordPress site is often a blog, or web-based journal featuring regular posts or updates by individuals or agents of an organization. The content you’re reading now is hosted on COLI’s WordPress blog, although you may have arrived at this content through a Facebook post, Twitter post, or Email that contained a link to this post.
You may use WordPress for a set of static, hyperlinked pages, and never use a blog. If you simply wished to broadcast documentation, or curate a set of images and videos, you could just as easily use our Wiki, Confluence, which is also available to faculty and staff. For even quicker web publishing, you could create a Google Doc and publish it. But WordPress provides more customization and design options than a set of wiki pages or Google Docs, making for a more attractive and professional-looking site, instead of a simple set of pages.
WordPress’s powerful blogging engine can be connected to social media, emailing tools, and other resources so that your updates are published in various places, and made available to more subscribers. Your blog needn’t simply be a place where people go to learn about your work, or your organization’s news, but instead can feed a serialized email newsletter or Facebook and Twitter feeds.
Sound interesting? Canisius College Faculty and Staff may contact the Center for Online Learning & Innovation to request a WordPress site. Next, schedule an appointment with us to explore what you can do, and the easiest way to do it, within your WordPress site. We’re big WordPress fans, and would be happy to help!