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Web Development and Hosting

Tools and services for publishing and managing online content. A variety of free and for-fee options allow the Stanford community to create and administer a dynamic, secure, and recognizable web presence.

WordPress is an open source blog tool and publishing platform. Easy-to-install, centrally supported WordPress instances are available at no charge to Stanford departments and officially-recognized groups for use in web.stanford.edu web space.

The Stanford CGI (Common Gateway Interface) Service enables users to run programs on the web server to provide dynamic content, collect user input, and offer services otherwise unavailable on the normal Stanford Web service. CGI is available, by request, to any user, group, or department with assigned AFS space.

For every class taught at Stanford, faculty members and TAs are entitled to a suite of centrally-hosted online services that have become an indispensable part of University-level instruction: web site space and templates, an email mailing list, a newsgroup for online discussions, and a central location on the campus network for sharing and storing documents and other data. There is no charge for these services.

The Stanford Web Forms Service is available to Stanford affiliates with a full service SUNet ID to make contact forms, short surveys and polls, instructor evaluations, and other forms free of charge. No knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, or SQL is required.

Google Apps for Education provides email, calendar, chat, document management, group, and site support for undergraduates at Stanford. Faculty, staff, and graduate students have access to Google document management, groups, and sites.

The Metrics Dashboard presents details about the health and performance of many of the systems provided by University IT. This service is available free-of-charge to current faculty, staff, and students.

Qualys Vulnerability Scanner finds security vulnerabilities in web applications and other network services and helps you remediate them.

An SSL certificate is a signed electronic guarantee that verifies the authenticity of a particular server. It's used for providing web pages through an encrypted connection. Any service accessible by SSL must have a certificate, including any web server with encrypted or “secure” content.

The Stanford Web Services unit builds department and group websites that are hosted on a shared infrastructure and provides assistance with larger projects requiring dedicated hosting or custom design. In addition, Stanford Web Services staff help to design and maintain key components of the University's shared and self-service web publishing tools.

The Qualtrics survey tool is an easy-to-use, full-featured, web-based tool for creating and conducting online surveys.

IP video conferencing integrates audio, video, and interactive collaboration tools to create a meeting experience in which globally dispersed participants feel as if they're in the same room. An IP video conferencing call control/transport service is in development for the campus community.

Stanford’s central web infrastructure services are available free to University departments, officially recognized groups, and all members of the Stanford community who have a full-service SUNet ID. These services are part of the main campus computing infrastructure and are handled by a server called web.stanford.edu.

Stanford University uses Google Custom Search to provide quick and useful web search results, advanced search features (including searching for PDF, .doc, and .ppt files and displaying them as HTML), powerful search administration, and easy integration into web sites.

The Stanford Virtual Host Service lets you replace a long, unwieldy URL with one that is shorter and/or more descriptive of your website content. These virtual URLs, also called vanity URLs, help people remember how to get to your web site and make it easier for them to type its URL into their browser.

Stanford Sites is a self-service tool for building and managing Drupal-based websites for University work. Stanford Sites is available for use directly by faculty, staff, and students as a free, self-service utility requiring little technical expertise.

Workgroup Manager is a web application that gives Stanford community members a place to define groups of community members for use in various online applications, including web authentication. Though the name workgroup may imply usefulness only to faculty or staff, workgroups can be helpful to, and maintained by, anyone with a current SUNet ID.