Departmental Webspace

USING DEPARTMENTAL WEBSPACE AT CLEMSON

If you need departmental webspace, you must first have a Central group. Log in to https://central.clemson.edu and verify the name of the group or create the group. Then complete this form to request a new departmental webspace: https://www.clemson.edu/webmaster/departmental-webspace/

The URL for your site will be https://departmentalsitename.sites.clemson.edu (where departmentalsitename matches the name of the group depending on the request you make in the form for the name of your site). Continue below to learn more about your departmental webspace.

INSTRUCTIONS TO ACCESS FILES

You can be on campus, connected to CUVPN, or use CUAPPS. If your computer is not domain joined, add campus\ to your username when signing in to access your files.

If you have a Windows PC, please follow these instructions:

Open File Explorer and navigate to This PC (or may appear as My PC, PC, or some other variation on some Windows computers)
Select Map Network Drive in the ribbon (you may have to click on ... to see Map option or right-click the This PC)
Select an arbitrary (unused) drive letter, in the Drive list
In the folder box, type in the following: \\sites.zfs.clemson.edu\sites
Select Finish

If you have MacOS, please, follow these instructions:

Select Finder
Select Go from the Finder menu
Select Connect to Server from the drop-down menu
Type in smb://sites.zfs.clemson.edu/sites
Select Connect

APPLICATIONS TO EDIT YOUR WEB PAGE

There are many free applications you can use to edit the files of your webspace. One is Visual Studio Code. (You cannot use WebDAV.)

FILES THAT CONTROL ACCESS TO YOUR SITE

You should create an index.php, index.html, or index.htm file and store it in the folder that matches your sitename if you want viewers to land on your website by using the URL https://sitename.sites.clemson.edu (where you replace "sitename" with the name of your site). If you do not have one of those files, users will get an "Unauthorized Access" error when they use your URL.

In this example, we have mapped a drive to \\sites.zfs.clemson.edu\sites. We navigated to the top-level folder that matched the sitename - clemsonittrainers. In that folder there is a file index.html. So if a user opens the URL https://clemsonittrainers.sites.clemson.edu, it will open the file index.html from the folder named clemsonittrainers in this example.

SEARCH ENGINE INDEXING

Search engine indexing is no longer blocked by default. So if you do nothing, your site can be searched.

To block searching on all or part of your website, add a robots.txt file. This file was created to instruct web robots or "crawlers" on how to interact with a website. The file specifies which parts of the website should not be accessed by search engines or other automated web crawlers

To disallow all search engine crawlers from indexing a website, you can create a robots.txt file with the following lines:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This tells all user agents (search engine crawlers) not to access any content on your website.

You can also use robots.txt file to selectively block certain directories or files from being indexed. For example, to block the indexing of a directory called "private", create a robots.txt file with the following lines:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/

This tells all user agents not to access any content in the "private" directory on the website.

SHIBBOLETH PROTECTION

If you need to create a htaccess file (to limit user access to your web page), you can find Shibboleth attribute and formatting examples here: https://ccit.clemson.edu/services/technical/web-services/diy-web-tools/htaccess-control/.

SSL

With this service your site will only support https connections. So your website URL will be https://departmentalsitename.sites.clemson.edu

Click here for an article on Personal Webspace at Clemson.

Click here for information about what happens with Sites on and after February 29, 2024.

If you have more questions, email ITHELP@clemson.edu or call 864-656-3494.