As Illinois Tech has moved to retire the old MyPages platform for faculty websites, the university has identified Google Sites as the preferred platform for individual faculty web pages. This page is meant to provide resources and lines of support to IIT faculty in creating, maintaining, and/or migrating content to a Google Sites webpage.
At the request of the University, Jim Maciukenas (PhD Technical Communication, IIT 2013) offered a training session for faculty, drawing upon his experience of creating a number of websites using Google Sites for multiple IIT scholars and labs. The recording of that session is on this page, and a pdf of his slides can be found below. Here are also a number of resources that he identified to assist IIT faculty.
Google Sites Help
Google Sites Help Community
Google Sites Help Ask the Community
Google Workspace Learning Center
What can you do with Sites?
Google Sites training and help
Sites cheat sheet
Illinois Tech's Marketing & Communication department and the Paul V. Galvin Library have teamed up to offer support to faculty for content editing and copyright support. Illinois Tech faculty should feel free to reach out at any point with questions by emailing library@iit.edu.
Guidelines and Content Review Process
General Guidelines
In general, when creating research websites, faculty should follow the same universally accepted standards of academic and research integrity that they practice in their work. Faculty sites should highlight only official university work that the faculty members are conducting as part of their appointment at Illinois Tech.
These sites should include content (e.g., copy, graphics) that the faculty members can verify they have the rights and authority to use (e.g., they/their students created the copy/graphics/images themselves; if not, they should have written approval to use the materials from the owner).
Faculty should ensure that any content/graphics/images that need to be attributed are properly attributed on the site (e.g., a photo that needs to have a caption attributing the source).
Content Review Process
Written content for the sites should be placed into an editable Word or Google document (Google preferred) and sent to Marketing and Communications for copyediting. Content should follow the templates/navigation structure that was created for these websites as much as possible. Submit content via M&C’s project management system, Wrike, using this form. (Faculty do not need Wrike licenses and do not need to register to submit a request.) A M&C content team member will provide a general, cursory review for editorial accuracy based on the university's editorial style guide (which is the industry standard AP Style, with some modifications). The Illinois Tech Editorial Style Guide can be accessed online for anyone who has questions during the writing process. The M&C team member who completed the edits will notify the faculty member once the editing is complete. Faculty can then build their websites.
Once the sites are built, faculty should Email library@iit.edu to inform Galvin Library staff once the sites are built. Faculty may reach out to the library staff at any time with questions regarding image copyright, use of scholarly materials, and the like. Additionally, the Galvin Library has a guide on use of media and images here: https://guides.library.iit.edu/FindingMedia
If an Illinois Tech Faculty member had content on a previous MyPages site, both OTS and the Library have access to the previous files as well an archived version of the webpage. You can reach out directly to library@iit.edu to request access to the archived version of any of these sites. For access to various files on these sites, you may have to file a helpdesk ticket with OTS.
Marketing and Communications has also made a wide range of images of campus buildings available for faculty use.
These must be accessed while logged into your Illinois Tech google account.
Wide range of images across colleges:
A more curated list of images:
Preferred photos of campus buildings:
This guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
