Multisites

Setting up a series of sites? For larger projects, we offer different ways for heritage groups to share facilities and keep down costs.

What is a multisite?

Several related heritage projects – for towns and villages within a particular county, for example – can share a single web address and website in order to reduce costs. For example, in Ireland we set up a multisite for seven projects recording the heritage of towns and villages around Galway. In Cambridgeshire, over 30 community archives share their catalogues on a multisite for the Cambridgeshire Community Archive Network.

Multisite or network?

A multisite is just one way of keeping down costs. In a multisite, all the community groups have an individual sub-site under one web address and all the sub-sites have the same features and design. However, we can also group individual unique websites into a network of separate sites that can share a maintenance contract and keep down costs.

Keep down on-going costs

The initial start-up funding for these sites usually comes from a regional organisation such as Cambridgeshire County Council or the National Museum of Ireland – Rural Life. The on-going costs of hosting and maintenance are often paid by the groups themselves, but are kept as low as possible.

Search and share content across different sites

Our networks and multisites include a facility for searching for content across a range of sites. We can also enable sharing content between the sites. For example, one site in a network could be the ‘master site’, which contains a feed of the latest pages and comments from all the sites in the network.

Import existing data

We can import data from other sources. For example, two of our projects have imported data from Commanet archives. Commanet was widely-used archiving software which ceased to exist several years ago.

Tell us about your project and find out more

Contact us and we can talk you through the possibilities and the options.