For those students, staff and faculty involved in the maintenance of Calvin’s website, this Friday provided an opportunity to improve their understanding of the DotCMS platform through a series of workshops throughout last week. The workshops, which were intended to provide a refresher on the software, were led by Andy Rau, Calvin’s communications coordinator. All of Calvin’s websites are supported by the DotCMS software, which is a content management service.

This software was introduced several years ago to help those with limited coding experience, as well as to enforce Calvin standards regarding design and accessibility. Due to the disparity in computer literacy across departments, Calvin sites could often be visually and textually inconsistent; DotCMS has helped rectify these problems.

According to Rau, “Overall we’ve been very pleased with dotCMS since we introduced it … The response from the Calvin community has been positive and supportive, and I’ve found that most people are very happy when they realize that they can make website edits without the stress of wading through HTML code, or worrying that they might accidentally ‘break’ a webpage if they do something wrong.”

Attendance at the workshops of last week was healthy. While many of the attendees were academic office managers and staff in charge of related Calvin centers and institutes, several faculty members were also in attendance. Often, Rau provides one-on-one training in the DotCMS platform. However, workshops like these are hosted every couple months and provide a platform not only for those in need of a refresher, but also those who are interested in learning more about it.

For those students, staff, and faculty involved in the maintenance of Calvin’s website, this Friday provided an opportunity to improve their understanding of the DotCMS platform through a series of workshops throughout last week. The workshops, which were intended to provide a refresher on the software, were led by Andy Rau, Calvin’s Communications Coordinator. All of Calvin’s websites are supported by the DotCMS software, which is a content management service.

This software was introduced several years ago to help those with limited coding experience, as well as to make the enforcement of Calvin standards regarding design and accessibility. Due to the disparity in computer literacy across departments, Calvin sites could often be visually and textually inconsistent; DotCMS has helped rectify these problems. According to Mr. Rau, “Overall we’ve been very pleased with dotCMS since we introduced it… The response from the Calvin community has been positive and supportive, and I’ve found that most people are very happy when they realize that they can make website edits without the stress of wading through HTML code, or worrying that they might accidentally “break” a webpage if they do something wrong.”

Attendance at the workshops of last week was healthy. While many of the attendees academic office managers and staff in charge of related Calvin centers and institutes, several faculty members were also in attendance. Often, Mr. Rau provides one-on-one training in the DotCMS platform. However, workshops like these are hosted every couple months, and provide a platform not only for those in need of a refresher, but also those who are interested in learning more about it.