Our 1000+ websites are powered by WordPress Multisite and are hosted by Pantheon. Because we are in a large multi-tenant environment and we are a small team, we try to offer the best compromise between flexibility, cost and long-term sustainability and therefor therefore we have some recommendations and restrictions on what can be done and installed.

Our website hosting offering is divided in 3 levels of service:

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standard website

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• This is our out of the box solution. You request a website, we train you, you create the content and your website is ready to go.

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• You either have someone on your team or you hire a designer to give you a little bit of help.
• We give that person extra access to the back-end of WordPress to some extra styling work allowing them to change some styling details (colors, font sizes, spacing).

• You hire a web developer or agency to create a customized version of our core themes (main theme or affiliate themes).

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Advantages

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• easiest solution, a website can be created in a few days
• fully maintained and supported by SPH IT

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• fully maintained and supported by SPH IT if recommendations are followed

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• Much more flexibility in the design and the information architecture

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Minimum: Free

Average: $5/7k

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(*) see notes

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Minimum: $5k

Average: $20/30k

Maintenance costs: limited

(*) see notes

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• You are responsible for entering and updating the content
• This option offers the least flexibility of all.

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• You are responsible for entering and updating the content
• Styling changes should still meet with SPH Branding guidelines and digital accessibility requirements.
• Level of customization is limited to aesthetics and small visual adjustments.

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• You are responsible for entering and updating the content
• All changes should still meet with SPH Branding guidelines and digital accessibility requirements.
• You need a long term strategy and budget to keep your site up to date, fix bugs or comply with future Harvard policies.

(*) Rough pricing. Pricing would need to be estimated by a vendor and may vary greatly depending on the complexity of the project and the vendor. You should also discuss long term costs and maintenance strategy with your vendor.

Technical references for designers and developers

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• If you are not very familiar with WordPress, please start by reading our WordPress 101.
• We ask external developers to follow our theme and plugin files file structure as well as to comply with the official WordPress coding conventions and standards (more details about this here).
• You can find a list of available plugins here.
• WordPress updates are usually installed within 48h/72h of publication and plugins are updated at least once a week so you can safely assume that we are using the latest version of everything.
• We will usually not allow handmade or marketplace themes. Instead we ask you to create a child theme of either our own Main Theme or Affiliate Template.
• We recommend that you follow our JS and CSS versioning guidelines lines to avoid caching issues.
• While most of our websites are currently only available in English, all our themes and plugins must be i18n/l10n ready.
• Your plugins and themes should be well documented and thoroughly commented so they are easily maintainable by our team once your contract with the School is over. In addition you should follow our guidelines regarding PHPDocs in WordPress projects.
• For both technical and security reasons we do not allow plugins and themes that allow users to upload files outside of the standard WordPress media library.

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Important: Please read our guide on how to prepare your PR here /wiki/spaces/HSPHWebAppsArchive/pages/46925460.

Other resources

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