If you are a member of the UVa community, and you would like to have a custom website for teaching, learning, research, or service, you can have it hosted here, on SHANTI Pages. We support sites for students, faculty, and staff, and for individuals as well as organizations. The set up process is fast, and it is easy to maintain your site as your needs change. Just follow these steps:
STEP 1: Ask for a site. Use this form to request a site. Once we create your site account, we will email you the information you will need to log into it. Then you can immediately get started designing and adding content to your site. Note that if you don’t already have an account on SHANTI Pages, we will create one for you. And you can have more than one site: just let us know what your projects are, and we will accommodate you.
STEP 2: Get to know the Administration Page. The email message with information about your new site will contain two links — one will be a link to your site, the other a link to the log in page for your site. Go to the second link and log in to your site. Take a moment to become acquainted with the Administration Page — this is where you create and edit pages, and configure everything about the site. If you have been given a new user account, you may want to change your password, under “Users,” “Your Profile” in the left hand menu.
STEP 3: Choose a theme to define your site. The initial site we create for you will look pretty boring, but you can change that right away. Under the Administration Page item “Appearance,” you may choose and customize a theme to reflect the function and identity of your site. For example, you may want a theme for presenting photographs, or one designed to present current news for an organization. We have a number of themes to choose from, and many of them have advanced customization options. See the list of installed themes in the Administration Page, under “Themes,” to learn about which theme may suit your purposes. If you have your own theme, or aren’t sure what to use, let us know and we’ll talk you through it.
STEP 4: Choose plugins to enhance your site. SHANTI Pages has a number of plugins installed that you may activate or deactivate as you wish. For example, we have a plugin to embed LaTeX into your pages. See the list of installed plugins in the Administration Page, under “Plugins,” to see what is available. You can also learn more about which plugins may suit your needs by reading Plugins Worth Using. Again, if you want to use a plugin that is not available from our collection, let us know about it.
STEP 5: Add content to your site. Create and organize the content of your site. From the Administration Page, you can create either Posts or Pages — the difference is important — and within these, you may embed images, audio files, and video clips. Use Posts if you want to create a website with constantly changing information. Use Pages if you want to create a website with a more or less fixed structure. Or you may mix the two to create a hybrid site.
Learn your web rights and responsibilities regarding copyright and fair use before you post content on your site. Neither SHANTI Pages nor the University of Virginia is responsible for what you post — as a publisher on this site, it is your responsibility to know and respect the law. For more information about this important topic, see the guidelines created by the Office of General Counsel.
The tool we are using to support SHANTI Pages — WordPress MultiUser — is a simple but very powerful website construction kit. You can find useful information about it on many sites around the Web. We recommend taking a look at WordPress for Beginners, at the WordPress Codex site. Two things to bear in mind: First, WordPress and WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) are slightly different animals, so some of the things you will see in the documentation for the former will not apply to the latter. In particular, in WPMU users cannot directly edit themes, or update their own themes and plugins. Second, you will notice the web literature on WordPress has a lot to do with blogging. This reflects WordPress’s origins as blogging tool. However, it has matured into a full-blown website construction kit, and that is how SHANTI Pages has positioned it.