How to get support for your website

Finding the right person or team to fix a website problem depends on the fault and how your site is managed and hosted

Responsibility for looking after a website broadly breaks down into four areas:

  • Content: authoring, uploading and editing pages, images and attached files
  • Presentation: managing the stylesheets, templates, scripts and other HTML code that makes your site look and work how it does
  • Platform: maintaining the web content management system that hosts your site, such as Drupal, WordPress or Type3. This may include site-specific server configuration such as access control lists and URL rewriting
  • Infrastructure: the server resources and operating system that your web site platform runs on

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Content issues can include lexical, syntactic or semantics errors; factual errors; broken links; missing information; accessibility; copyright; compliance or other legal issues.

Errors associated with existing or missing content on a website should be reported to the site editor.

The site editor will normally be someone in the department or group that the site is for. In some cases this person will have the role of webmaster for the department or group. Many sites provide a feedback form that can be used to reach the site editor. Local IT staff or your department webmaster may also be able to identify the site editor for you.

Presentation issues can include issues with how the site is displayed and how it works when you interact with it.

These types of error should normally be reported to the site editor in the first instance.

If you are the site editor, have confirmed that a presentation error can be reproduced, and are not able to fix this yourself then you should follow the instructions below to check how your site is hosted and then request support as follows:

Platform issues can include performance and availability; error messages; site features not working or blocked access.

These types of error should normally be reported to the site editor in the first instance.

If you are the site editor, have confirmed that an error can be reproduced, and are not able to fix this yourself then you should follow the instructions below to check how your site is hosted and then request support as follows:

Infrastructure issues can include performance and availability issues.

Follow the instructions below to check how your site is hosted and then request support as follows.

Mosaic

Please use the Mosaic contact form.

Web hosting

Local IT should:

  1. Establish minimum steps and context required to reproduce the error
  2. Perform thorough checks of the installed web content management system, including applying any updates and/or reinstalling it
  3. Gather system logs or other diagnostic information showing the fault
  4. Contact our service desk with details from all the above steps

Other

Contact local IT or your commercial provider. Local IT staff (or other University employee responsible for contracting of commercial providers) can liaise with IT Services to help resolve associated issues such as network connectivity, DNS, SSL certificates and SSO integration.

Visit the Google DIG tool and lookup your website hostname in the form www.unit.ox.ac.uk.

  • If the results show a CNAME entry with a target of env-prod-01.web.ox.ac.uk then your live site is hosted on our Mosaic service
  • If the results show a CNAME entry with a target of nsmswebXX.nsms.ox.ac.uk then your live site is hosted on our comprehensive web hosting service
  • Any other result indicates that you have local, commercial or custom hosting for your website

Related links

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The Central IT Service Desk is available 24x7 on +44 1865 6 12345

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