📰How to create content-first websites
The easiest way to create a website is to have its contents taken from a Uniweb profile. To accomplish this, you simply have to click on "New website", select the type of primary profile that you are interested in, and then choose the specific profile to use from a list. The final step is to choose a template for the website, which can be changed at a later time if desired.
You are done! You now have a modern website that is mobile friendly and accessible to the visually impaired. If you selected the multilingual option and have content in several languages, your website is also multilingual.
That was easy and fast. You invested time and energy entering content to your profiles and got a great website out of that. Uniweb leveraged your investment and built an effective website with advanced technical features that will make it highly visible on the web.
You can now add extra personalization via preferences, themes and custom webpages with unlimited potential.
Understanding the process
Creating a website from a profile is an optimal use of your time and also a well-known design principle that calls for separating content from aesthetics.
Is a primary profile always needed?
Website templates are designed and optimized for each content category. For example, a personal academic website is usually different from a lab or project website, where there is a team of individuals rather than a single researcher. By selecting a primary profile, we are instructing the system to build a website based on design decisions that best communicate that specific type of content.
For the cases in which building an entirely custom website is appropriate or more expedient, the choice of primary profile can be left blank.
How are the relationships between profiles used in a website?
The primary profile of a website will usually be connected to several other profiles. For example, a researcher's profile is connected with several research groups and projects via a "member of" relationship. All profile relationships emanating from the primary profile are followed and the information in the connected profiles is used when building the website. What's more, when the secondary profiles change, the website changes to reflect that automatically.
Can a website be personalized beyond its website template?
Each website template comes with its own set of personalization options. When you choose a template, you can edit those options at that time or later.
You can also go beyond the template options and edit the options of individual page components. And if that's not enough, you can create new blank pages and then add your choice of web components to them along with any needed custom content. You can go as far as having an entire website made out of custom web pages.
Is it possible to have a general type of website that builds itself?
There is a profile type that can be used for storing general content. It is the folder profile. It is literally a folder that can contain other profiles, including folders. You can place articles and webpages in any folder profile.
To build a website from the contents of a folder and its subfolder, select the folder as the primary profile of a new website. The result is a self-built website made entirely out of a collection of content organized hierarchically, which is ideal to share documentation and teaching material on the web.
What is the web domain assigned to new websites?
The specifc URLs for personals and group websites depends on the preferences of each institution. An institution can assign a base URL for all websites. For example, https://example.org/sites/mywebsite or https://site.example.org/mywebsite.
An institution can also allow for custom domains, where you get the option to provide your own preferred domain for each of your websites. That use case involves a few extra steps such as buying a domain and configuring it to work with Uniweb.
Going forward
Once a website is created, you and your colleagues just have to manage the information on the profiles that each owns. The rest is done by the CMS and your choice of website template.
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