EvCC’s new website launched on Jan. 30, following a countdown timer on the old website’s home page and emails sent to students proclaiming “the wait is finally over.”
After 14 years of the old design, the entire site has been overhauled with a new visual layout, new content and new features.
Visiting the page now gives you a more modernized, polished experience. A video of smiling students on campus is prominently displayed at the top, along with a row of student spotlights and success stories, an optimized calendar of upcoming events and a statistics section that boasts EvCC’s enrollment numbers as you scroll the revamped home page.
The decision to rebuild the website from the ground up was made in late 2023, due to the old website being difficult to navigate, containing outdated information and being built on old technology that could not be updated. Executive Director of Technology Services Ed Alexander and Associate Director of Marketing Jenny Marin were both intimately involved with the website redesign from the beginning.
One of the old site’s biggest problems was one that the public never saw. The site’s servers were previously hosted on the EvCC campus, which Alexander said resulted in the website going down during tech maintenance and power outages. He explained that the Tech Services team would have to carefully plan routine updates to take place when the site was not expecting high traffic.
“Now that we’ve moved onto the new site, it’s hosted off of our campus. So if there’s any issues on campus here, the site will continue to be our public face and our way to get information out,” he said.
The software was not the only part of the site to receive a complete overhaul, as every page was audited and all content was updated or rewritten to be accurate and up-to-date.
The pages for each individual pathway have been streamlined to make it easier for students to find the necessary information for their individual program or degree. A more accurate search feature and a reorganized header were added in an attempt to make site navigation simple.
“We wanted to organize things so that it made logical sense to students trying to find things. Before we were more organized by the college’s org(anization) chart rather than how students are actually looking for information,” Marin said.
The new layout is intended to be mobile-friendly and fully accessible to those using screen readers. English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese translations of the website are available, which Alexander described as “not just a Google Translate, it’s an actual vetted translation.”
Clicking on the button in the bottom right corner of the site will open an AI support chat bot. The addition of AI assistants to the page is an attempt to answer student questions quickly and easily. But so far, the AI seems to have access to incomplete information and struggles to answer anything beyond very basic questions.
The redesign of the website also means that several old links are no longer functional, and information pertaining to many activities and locations on campus is now inaccessible.
The website is still in a transition phase, with minor updates helping to iron out issues. “The stabilization of the site will take a couple months,” Alexander said. “There still might be broken links or little things that we’ll have to fix, but once we have it stabilized, then we can start to plan possible updates and new pages as feedback comes back to us.”
Marin was grateful for everyone who helped the college with the redesign. “This site took two years worth of work, we had a committee of nine people that entire time who met weekly. We had a very dedicated vendor and over a hundred editors from across campus and over a hundred students, staff and community members who did the testing phases for us.”
Eleven students interviewed by The Clipper said they had not noticed there was a new website. Resources for current students are mainly centralized on Canvas and ctcLink, so many students may not even visit the main EvCC website regularly.
Marin and Alexander both said that the website is currently focused on attracting prospective students, but that they are looking towards future optimizations to make sure the site helps current students access the information they need.
“We would really like to know how students are feeling about it. I know that it’s always a big change when things you’re used to move around, but we want to make this tool helpful for students to enroll at EvCC and to continue on to graduation,” Marin said.
“Anyone can share feedback with us.”
