Remodeled website makes MHCC shine

By JILL AHO

MHCC’s new website is its newest face for potential students. It makes the school a far more friendly-looking place to study than the one before it. The school’s efforts to increase enrollment are going to be well served by this window in and out of our school. The content on the homepage changes periodically and gives people a reason to come back and visit, just to find out what is going on.

I know that part of building a new website is working out the kinks. I am pleased that online services is under the Quicklinks tab and that distance learning has its own easily accessible link on the side of the page. These have really come in handy.

It might seem like the new website is harder to navigate. For instance, the other day I was trying to figure out how to find the theater page. I found it eventually, don’t worry, but it wasn’t obvious how to get there. In fact, I found several pages I had never seen before, all related to the theater department. One was even like a front door to the theater pages, filled with photos from past productions. I thought, “That’s new.”

This doesn’t bother me that much because I can understand why I feel this way. If I was blind and someone came to my house and moved all my furniture around, I would not know if I were in the right apartment when I got back. The website is like this: I don’t know where anything is, and it is frustrating me. It’s like someone came and messed up my house as a joke.

Familiarity with something is such a comforting feeling. I never thought I would get attached to a website the way I have the Mt. Hood one. It is such an integral part of what I do everyday, I must know how to use it, and where to find the information I know is there somewhere. This has forced me to work more diligently to become proficient at navigating it.

Regardless, there are still times when I stare at the tabs on the homepage trying to figure out where to start looking. Will it be under student life, or current students? Should I look under student services or programs of study?

The website’s content is being expanded, and I can hardly keep up. Documents and lists that were not available before have been popping into my radar like lightening bugs on a summer evening. The additional information is to the benefit of not only student journalists, but everyone who has a question or is curious about something Mt. Hood related.

Even the search engine has been improved. I don’t know how many people used it before, but all it seemed able to find were documents from early in this decade, not to mention it seemed like the content was never what I was looking for.

I’m not saying there isn’t room for improvement. I tried typing in “theater” and the first document that popped up was a list of books and videos available in the library. This is the closest match to theater? Regardless, a link to the theater page was the next in line. And for the first time in a long time, all the documents were actually related to the subject.

The real problem is that it’s just new. It’s different, and maybe I am uncomfortable with change. I like it, to an extent, but don’t mess with my information.

Overall, the website is far more aesthetically pleasing than it used to be, and there are some really friendly public relations efforts going on. All this is to the benefit of the college because prospective students are shopping for a college online, and if they stumble on MHCC’s site, they may base their decision on what they find there.