Website Support

Website Hosting

Getting a New Site, or Moving an Existing One - Who to Contact

DoIT offers two tiers of website hosting:

• Free, with few bells and whistles - WiscWeb
• Paid, with more options and more responsibility - DoIT Web Hosting

Website Technical Support - Campus Hosted Sites Only - Problems, Questions, and Training

Who provides tech support depends where the site is hosted. Generally the sites are hosted either at DoIT or CALS Web Services.

To determine who to call, look at the very bottom of the website. Sites hosted by CALS Web Services will have a black horizontal bar with Login, Request Help, and Help Docs links.

If your site is hosted at CALS Web Services...

• Complete the CALS Web Services request form.

If your site is hosted at DoIT...

• Contact the DoIT Help Desk.

Russell Labs No Longer Hosts or Supports Lab Websites

A few years ago, we retired or moved existing websites elsewhere (DoIT or CALS Web Services).

Campus does not offer website hosting for student org sites, including RSOs and DRSOs. The campus-recommended hosting solution for this content is the Wisconsin Involvement Network (WIN). 

Please direct questions about the three department websites to:

• Entomology - Ben Bradford
• Forest and Wildlife Ecology - complete this form 
• Plant Pathology - complete this form

 Website accessibility is a complex and specialized topic. Recommendations and best practices also change over time.

If you have questions about website accessibility, you should contact DoIT’s Center for User Experience. Russell Labs Administrative Hub staff cannot provide guidance on this topic, or review or audit your content for compliance. 

See also: Website Accessibility Resources KB doc

We cannot restore old websites created by students who once worked at Russell Labs. 

The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is an independent organization that sometimes archives websites.

Keep in mind that the archive may not:

• contain the site at all
• the archive may not contain the page you're looking for, or the version of the page you want
• if the page exists in the archive, the format may be at least partially broken 

Further, the organization is funded by donations. There's no guarantee it will continue to exist in the future.

To search the archive by URL or keyword, use the Wayback Machine.*

*the search box at the top that says enter URL or keywords, not the search box further down that says "Search." 

How Can I Save My Website?

For a number of technical reasons, there isn't a good way to just "Save as" and capture an entire modern website and bring it up later somewhere else, with all the same functionality. Software constantly changes.

If you have a smaller site, you could save the content of each page individually. Check your browser for a "Save page as" command.  

This will save the page as a file that can be brought up in a browser, and download and save the images in a folder. Check that everything you want is there.

Note that websites often contain bells and whistles. This "save page as" can't deal with things like animations and fancy image sliders, it's designed for capturing text and images.

Remember

Websites do not live forever. They require ongoing maintenance to stay compliant with campus and federal laws, like the digital accessibility laws.

When you leave a website behind, you abandon it, and it continues to take up space. Other people may need that space in the future, and hosting providers may remove abandoned websites to free up space.