Why Marionette?

The Marionette Content Management System (CMS) was first made available in the Fall Semester of 2004.  Before that, there was not a policy or system for providing support for departmental websites.

Why it was created...

Warren Wilson has many programs, departments, clubs, and individuals who could benefit from a website, but most of the people involved don’t know how to build one and don’t have the considerable time to invest in learning. The office of the Web Director is here, in part, to help those interested in enriching the college’s on-line neighborhood with websites for these groups. Unfortunately, the average medium-sized website can often take weeks to build. When you multiply that by the number of groups on campus that would like help with a website, a long waiting list quickly develops. When you consider that maintaining the larger college website is the primary responsibility of the Web Director and Web Crew, the time available to devote to other websites is very limited, and the result is an unacceptable level of service.

When left to their own devices, many groups on campus rely on their own student crews or on various programs to create their websites, and this results in a number of problems.

• Crew members are transient, and the ability to maintain a website may not be something that a future crew person can handle.
• Programs are often expensive and require a large investment of learning time for little reward (since the vocabulary and process of one program rarely transfers to another deliberately to lock-in customers).
• Pages created by a plethora of different people lack any consistent elements, making the overall experience of the college website a bewildering forest of different designs and navigation schemes for the average user.
• Increasingly complicated technology makes the more common, older programs obsolete (meaning they will create websites that are "broken" in modern browsers) and also makes the likelihood of learning to build a website in a reasonable amount of time slim.
• Crew members moving on or website authors losing programs frequently result in websites staying out of date for years.

Marionette was developed to address these problems and empower groups on campus to create and manage quality websites that maintain consistency with the larger college site. Though ot without problems, Marionette is fairly easy to understand and use--much more so than other website creation programs. Marionette is the virtual member of the Web Crew, always available to help you update or build your website.