On April 1, online visitors, students, faculty members, and content creators across campus will be introduced to an updated website.
The Marketing and Communications department plans on providing content creators with a more user-friendly design.
Web and information designer and leader of the web services team James Pollock anticipates a simpler future regarding campus information sharing.
“We are looking for an easy-to-use intuitive design, not only for the average user that comes across the website but also for the content creators across campus,” Pollock said.
The current and soon to be old website design requires content creators to possess some knowledge of HTML. HTML is a cornerstone programming language of the World Wide Web.
For more than 20 years, it has been a top choice for creating web pages and applications, but with the advent of more open source-management systems, a working knowledge of coding languages is less necessary for sharing information.
The MARCOM team hopes to limit the amount of coding done by website users.
“The templates that we had in the past require the user to know more about HTML. The templates we are using now are more like a WordPress,” Pollock said. “They just fill in form fields. The end result is more appealing.”
Currently, the web services team is in the process of designing templates that will be available to content creators campus-wide.
The new templates will expedite webpage construction and simplify the creative process.
They will also provide the university website with a uniformity that is currently absent.
“In the old system, content creators designed their own pages and they weren’t always uniform across the website,” Pollock said.
Content creators aren’t the only ones who will benefit from the update. Visitors will find that the new website is easy to navigate.
No longer will they have to read through paragraphs of information to find links to get them to their desired location. Excess information is being tossed out so that users can navigate the website with expediency.
Engineering students Kevin Carrillo and Joseph Coulaf look forward to the update.
“I feel that updating the website would be of good use,” Carrillo said. “I run into minor problems such as it crashing on me every now and then.”
Coulaf hopes the new design will take on a new look that does away with wordy links.
“I’d like the links to not be complete words. More pictures would make it look nice,” Coulaf said. “It needs to look more official.”
Though the website update rolls out in April, the MARCOM team will continue to update the website so that they can continually meet and surpass user expectations.
“We are always going to continue to make it better,” Pollock said.
