The days of hide and seek on the Pierce College website will be coming to an end.
Pierce’s Information Technology (IT) and Web design team are aiming to finish the new page by October.
Interim President Ara Aguiar explained why the update is happening.
“We realized that we had a lot of pages that were inaccurate,” Aguiar said. “We wanted to make sure that they were accessible. We wanted to simplify it because our students are telling us that it was very complex.”
Public Relations Manager Doreen Clay said that the website may be puzzling, but that will change.
“I thought it might be confusing to people that we had this update, and it’s really only on the homepage and the student page as well,” Clay said. “Things on the back end are still the same. They decided to go ahead and do this interim update. The new website is scheduled to debut in October 2022.”
Clay said that the Los Angeles Community College District’s (LACCD) office and nine colleges will have their websites redone by the company Sensis.
“[They] have gone through our website and created a new one based on Drupal software,” Clay said.
Some of the changes to the page and student portal included an updated design to make things more accessible with a mega menu, use of a new header, footer and a new image banner.
The website will have new fonts from the Google font library and a code base along with improvements on the mobile site to make it more accessible for anyone to navigate.
“We’re taking off a lot of stuff that’s for faculty, staff and the community, and really making this very student-friendly,” Clay said.
Links have been reorganized and moved to the mega menu and there are a new set of guidelines established to help traverse and follow standards for the upcoming website.
The new site aims to be more insured and consistent in design.
“It’s going to be more secure and it’s going to have a more unified look across the website instead of pages that were made by different people,” Clay said.
Nursing major Naavi Kaur said she had trouble navigating through the old page.
“There’s a lot of options and a lot of icons, and a lot of stuff going on,” Kaur said. “So I called the administration offices to ask ‘Where do I go and how do I do this and that?’”
Business and Sociology major Nelson Solares said that using the former site was difficult for him, but he’s already loving the improvement it has made.
“Pierce had this very archaic looking 1990s website,” Solares said. “Now, I actually love the changes that they made in the past week.”
Psychology and Statistics Professor Angela Belden said that she noticed the page had moved the faculty and staff tab and a tool for helping students keep track of their academics to the top of the homepage.
Until more updates appear, the community at Pierce will have to wait.
“I’m really looking forward to this new website,” Aguiar said. “I think it’s simpler. I think it looks more modernized.”
