Why can't you make and/or fix my website for me?

ULYSSIS is a non-profit student organisation with usually between 15 and 20 members. These members, most are students but some might have recently transitioned to a job or PhD, maintain our server hardware, make sure all the systems of our hosting run, answer support tickets, check security, organise events such as the ULYSSIS CTF and Open Source Job Fair, co-organise the 24 hour run, organise several workshops a year, give technical advice and support to LOKO, and develop internal an external software tools such as Stemt.org.

As you can imagine, it's often already too large a task to do so many different things with such a small group of members. Even after automating as many of our tasks as possible, our team finds it challenging to take on long term projects such as replacing dated components of our hosting infrastructure, because we spend so much time answering support tickets. As you can imagine, hosting around 50 organisations and over 150 websites for students, staff and organisations at KU Leuven, means that it would be highly unrealistic if our members had to frequently intervene in existing websites or create complete new ones.

We understand that it's a difficult task to create a new website and that maintenance can at times be challenging too. We also understand that your situation is very unique to your organisation or circumstances. We think however that it would be unfair if we would help some and not others. We therefore make lots of documentation available on this website, we give advice and help to look for solutions in support tickets, and we attempt to steer people towards easier maintenance.

Specifically, we are convinced that WordPress offers the most user friendly way to create a website while retaining as much creative freedom as possible. Our manual page Setting up WordPress details how to install WordPress in a few easy steps and includes screenshots to show you what to do. Installing is a one time thing, so once your website exists you will never need to do it again. What you will have to do more frequently is update WordPress and any themes and plugins you may use. Luckily, this can all be achieved by the press of a button. On our documentation page about Updating WordPress we explain how you can enable automatic updates for all components of your WordPress website. That way, you will usually never have to do any maintenance at all.

For advice on how to build or maintain your website, you can of course always contact ulyssis@ulyssis.org with specific questions or situations.