As stated in the University Web Policy, Villanova University provides personal homepages for active faculty, staff, and students on a by-request basis to provide an on-demand solution that will be maintained and available for the duration of an individual’s account at Villanova.
Please Note: UNIT is solely responsible for hosting the homepage. The faculty, staff, or student is responsible for managing content and becoming familiar with editing their site using their software of choice.
If the content or appearance violates the policy on Ethical Conduct for Use of Computing and Communication Resources, the Student Code of Conduct, or any other University policy, the University reserves the right to remove the user's personal site from the server, discontinue the person's account and take such other action as may be necessary in its discretion.
Suggested Software to Edit Your Site
Although we do not provide support for any personal website editing software, we can recommend that you use Adobe Dreamweaver, which is available to full-time faculty and staff as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud bundle and can be downloaded on their own Mac or PC as needed. There are many YouTube videos available to help you become familiar with the software.
- Download Dreamweaver (from Adobe Creative Cloud) (with Dreamweaver 2020) on Villanova issued laptops only
- Gateway/VPN (when needing to connect to network files from off campus)
If you are a part-time staff member and/or do not have access to Dreamweaver, you may use any software that can connect to the WebDav server as explained below.
Getting Started
To set up your personal website, you will need to know the "container number" for your website. (If you have never used your website, be sure it has been enabled. If it is not, please email support@villanova.edu and have a support request created to have your website enabled).
Please Note: this URL will also be your public URL where individuals can navigate to your site.
- Type into a browser: http://homepage.villanova.edu/firstname.lastname. This will automatically redirect to your actual website URL and reveal your container number.
[Ex: http://www22 .homepage.villanova.edu/firstname.lastname/ ..therefore, your container number is 22 .]
Setting Up and Connecting to Your Site
If you are setting up your site new, open Dreamweaver and click on the Site menu at the top and choose New Site. This will bring up the Site Setup dialog.
In the first tab, the Site tab, you will name your site and choose the local folder on your desktop where you will store your site content. Click Save.
Select the Servers tab on the left, you will click the + sign to begin a Site Setup dialog box.
Within the Basic tab of the dialog, fill out the fields as follows:
- Server Name: Type https://webdavusers.villanova.edu.
- Connect Using: Choose WebDAV from the dropdown.
- URL: Type in the URL to your website as https://webdavusers.villanova.edu/##/firstname.lastname, where ## is the homepage container and common.name is the homepage directory (usually your full name). Be sure your URL begins with https://.
- Username/Password: You will use your Villanova ID and PW.
- Web URL: Will automatically populate when you fill out the URL field.
Click Save. This will save it as an option in your website dropdown within the Files tab to the right. To connect to the remote server, click the connect icon that looks like two plugs.
You will now be connected to your Remote Server and can now pull down or push up website files as needed.
Site Editing Options
You have the option to edit your site live (directly on the production server) or locally (on your local hard drive to be published later).
When connected to your site, use the dropdown on the right to switch between Local View and Remote Server.
- To connect to the Remote Server, click the connect icon (two plugs icon).
Editing Your Site Live/Directly
The servers will be backed up should you need to recover any pages or items within your site. Once you have opened up the Dreamweaver software, you may edit live by doing the following:
Publishing Your Files (Local Editing)
If you are working locally and need to get files from or put files to the Remote Server, click the corresponding arrow under the Site dropdown on the right.