Trinity Domains gives students, faculty, and staff a space on the web with which they can do nearly anything. Instead of shoehorning everyone into a WordPress blog (as powerful as WordPress is) with a limited palette of institutionally-chosen plugins and themes, Trinity Domains gives you the ability to install almost anything you want, with real ownership over the technology choices and the content you put up.

Trinity Domains is our instance of A Domain of One’s Own, which started at the University of Mary Washington in 2012 and is made possible in partnership with Reclaim Hosting. Over 40 schools now have A Domain of One’s Own, including schools such as Davidson, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Middlebury, as well as larger schools. For an overview of the Domain of One’s Own project, we recommend this article in Wired.

Getting Started

Trinity Domains all starts with a domain name: [the name you pick].domains.trincoll.edu.  This domain name will represent you to the wider world, so it’s worth having a think about it.

[Technical note: actually, you’re signing up for a subdomain: trincoll.edu is the main domain, domains.trincoll.edu is a subdomain of trincoll.edu, and [the name you pick].domains.trincoll.edu is a subdomain of *that*. This is all part of the Domain Name System that governs how internet servers talk with one another. However, as we’ll see elsewhere in the documentation, you can buy any available domain name you want and point it at your Trinity Domains subdomain.]

  • For your first time signing in: go to https://domains.trincoll.edu and click either the Get Started or Dashboard buttons.
  • You’ll be presented with a login screen: use your normal Trinity username and password.
  • If it’s your first time doing logging in, you will be invited to choose your subdomain.

You will then be at the cPanel interface, which will lead you to the Installatron application picker where you can start building your site. Most users use WordPress to create their website, but Domains also allows other content management systems, such as Omeka and Scalar.