Content Management System

Creating modern websites from scratch is slow and difficult.  The Content Management System (CMS) does the hard work, allowing you to focus on what you want to say to your site visitors.
It offers a lot of advantages:

• Mobile-friendly pages - Everything created on the CMS can be viewed easily on any device, regardless of its screen size.
• Reduced complexity - Many content types are already defined in the CMS, allowing you to easily plug in features without coding.
• You can schedule content to appear or disappear from your site.
• Fewer mistakes - The CMS ensures all links to other University of Galway pages work.  if someone changes a page's web address, your link will change with it.
• There are many other users on-campus, who are familiar with the CMS - and training is available for new users - so you could delegate / get help maintaining the site content.
• Site Consistency / Navigability / User Experience - Common headers, footers, menus, fonts, and colour schemes make the whole University of Galway site (including your section of it) easier to use for everyone.
• Legal compliance - The university templates, in the official CMS, automatically comply with EU accessibility and cookie laws.
• Security - Sites that are coded by busy non-professionals can have exploitable vulnerabilities that may be discovered by hackers.
• The CMS is fully supported by ISS who also provide a comprehensive CMS self-help website so you can get info / answers / examples quickly - even out of hours.

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For the best end-user experience, consistency of the look & feel is an important factor for all official NUI Galway pages (as opposed to webpages created by students for students). Using the university’s CMS ensures this automatically while also offering homepage customisation options and a large choice of content types to ensure each site’s individuality.

E.g. 1: CPD homepage, 2: Mature Students , 3: Med Tech page, 4: Prospective Students, 5: Parking Page, 6: About Galway, 7: Alert Page

Research groups, affiliated with this university but not solely consisting of NUI Galway personnel, can be granted leeway to change the colour scheme and add their own logo to their site design but this takes additional time to set up.
E.g. Blood Cancers, Abbey theatre minute books, Shannon College

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While it is possible to create a website on a different platform (such as WordPress), and also to give it an NUI Galway sub-domain name (e.g. mysite.nuigalway.ie), this approach is neither advised nor supported by ISS.  All hosting and maintenance costs would be unnecessarily borne by your unit and, once the sub-domain was set up, ISS would not be in a position to help with any technical issues.

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That would involve not using the university's CMS and coding the site yourself, from scratch.
While this is technically possible, we strongly advise against it for 3 main reasons:

• Site Consistency / Navigability / User Experience - Common headers, footers, menus, fonts, and colour schemes make the whole site easier to use for everyone.
• Legal compliance - The university templates, in the official CMS, automatically comply with EU accessibility and cookie laws.
• Security - Sites that are coded by busy non-professionals can have exploitable vulnerabilities that may be discovered by hackers.

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Using the CMS is not difficult.  However, it can do a lot of different things and it requires a way of thinking that is not completely natural for most people (not even techies). 
And it can take a surprisingly long time to get used to this way of thinking.

The training course helps a lot with this - that's why it is mandatory.  And during the training, you'll be introduced to a Bookmarklet called 'Simplify SM', which helps some beginners enormously.

After you complete the training, there may still be some time before you are at ease, when using the CMS.
A very small minority think it's really easy to use immediately.  But most of us are vaguely uncomfortable, when using it, for up to 2 weeks after training - even if we use it every day. 

After a certain time (it's different for everyone), this uncomfortable feeling will suddenly (and without warning) disappear forever - and you’ll wonder why you ever were uncomfortable, using the CMS.

Until then, if you stop using it for any length of time, you’ll easily forget how to do things - so you may need to re-watch some of the short training videos, as a reminder, when you return to it.

Many people struggle with the CMS simply because they think they don’t need to do all (or parts) of the training course.
The CMS is not like other IT systems – you need to be shown how to use it, regardless of how technical you are!
But some users refuse to watch the 2 hours of tuition and, because of that, will waste 2 or 3 hours every week doing something the wrong, hard, or slow way; getting stuck; raising support tickets and waiting for answers that trained users would know already. 

These untrained users have sometimes been known to complain that the CMS is too clunky / difficult / limiting - but this is not actually the case.

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The basic training covers everything the average user would need to create a University website from scratch.

it's possible to do a lot more with the CMS than the basic training covers.  If a trained user cannot remember how to do something, or if it wasn't covered in the basic training, they can look it up instantly in our comprehensive self-help resource, which is written for users at their level, so they can easily follow the instructions they find there.

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