Web publishing overview

This list is not comprehensive. There are many, many ways to build a web site. The goal of this document is to give a high-level overview of some common solutions seen by the California Office of Digital Innovation (ODI). There is no one-size-fits-all publishing architecture. Digital services teams should do their own research to find out what is right for their projects.

Good for:

Teams with non-web software engineers

Simple websites that don’t need to be updated very often

Good for:

Teams with proficient web engineers with experience coding in several languages and across several platforms.

Projects with simple publishing needs.

Good for:

Teams with one dedicated front end engineer with some WordPress experience.

Projects with complex publishing needs like scheduling and content moderation.

Good for:

Teams with no engineering staff.

Projects with complex publishing needs like scheduling and content moderation.

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https://caweb.cdt.ca.gov/faq-service-overview/⁠

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https://cmassearch.azurewebsites.net/⁠

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https://cdt.ca.gov/services/website-hosting/⁠

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https://caweb.cdt.ca.gov/our-customers/⁠

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[1] Performance scores can vary but typically static sites rank vary high. ODI’s static sites typically score 98-100 in Lighthouse.

[2] ODI has used GitHub instead of WordPress on several sites. This approach simplifies the engineering workload.

[3] There are some commercial products (Netlify, Vercel, etc.) that can speed up the build process.

Plain HTML

Headless - Decoupled WordPress and/or Github + static site generation

Traditional WordPress

CAWeb Publishing

Comparison

Resources

Footnotes