The Library Website: How Did This Happen

So, in preparation for seeing what I could share with the library community at large, I checked out the library website recently. Or at least, I tried to, but I failed on account of there not being one. This came as a surprise, since the school website has a link on it that supposedly goes to the library website, and students had mentioned it before, but no dice.

After some investigation with the rest of the faculty, hampered by the fact that the previous librarian and computer teachers both left this summer and couldn't be reached, and the IT department is actually outsourced to a private company and thus not always available for consultation that doesn't cost a fee, i eventually discovered that the library did have a website, but that the school had recently migrated all its sites to a new domain, and apparently that one somehow didn't make it. Since the librarian had left, no one noticed that the site itself was also gone, which was not a welcome realization for the administration, let me tell you.

So, naturally, they asked me to go ahead and make a new one. No problem, obviously! All those digital library courses have to be good for something, right?

The library definitely needs a site, if for no other reason than to be an easy portal for the students who use it to get to the catalog (which they currently have no idea how to access unless I put in the direct link to the database for them, which is a pretty glaring flaw). It would also be a good marketing tool for the school, which as a private religious institution needs to try to attract families as much as possible and can always use more evidence of their useful services and resources.

I was hoping that I could start from some of the files or structure of the old site... but those are apparently all irreparably destroyed, having been removed and wiped from the old site's server as soon as the migration was complete. According to the old paperwork we were able to dig up, the site was designed and constructed by a third-party vendor anyway, so the previous librarian, even if I could get hold of her, would be unlikely to have any insight into it.

So that leaves me with quite the conundrum. What do I do here? How do I go about building this thing? The administration seems to prefer that I write something in pure HTML so that all files are available to be uploaded to the diocese's proprietary server, but hoo boy, I have not tried to write even a simple personal site in HTML in years, let alone something professional enough to work for an institution. I could work with a provider site - WordPress or Wix, or something similar - but while that would definitely be easier, it'd be hosted remotely and vulnerable to the hoster's decisions about its continuing existence, and might be aggravating in terms of ownership passage if I leave the library's employ.

I guess I'm going to go with making some lists of needed features and sketches of possible designs for now, and ponder on it.