Hudson Valley’s new website launches students into the semester

Zoe Deno

Editor-in-Chief

Have you seen Hudson Valley’s website’s new look? Two years after beginning construction on a new website the college has finally launched it.

“We really wanted this website to be intuitive to prospective students, while still meeting the needs of our current students and faculty. The top pages are designed to be selling points of the college, the last website was designed for more internal use,” said Hudson Valley Community College’s Sandra Eyreman.

“The website is more organized now, instead of having a bunch of random links scattered around the page everything is labeled and organized. The sight would be intuitive, you shouldn’t need to take a class to learn how to use it,” Eyreman continued

One of the biggest updates that needed to be made was that the website needed to be able to be mobile responsive. The website had been given a failing grade by google for not having a mobile responsive website. Eyreman says that Google will push the website’s rankings up because it is now mobile responsive and that the website should be found easier.

The website is not entirely updated yet. “Wired is pretty important, it doesn’t seem very mobile friendly and its ugly,” said Hayden Spock, an liberal arts major.

Spock likes the new look for the website though. “It gives you a clear picture of what this school is all about,” he said.

John Kowol, a computer science major also enjoys the website’s new look, he thinks it looks “energizing.”

The new website offers several new features including an interactive campus map linked to the front page that allows students to click on where they are and the map will draw you a path. It also allows students to search for faculty by first or last name. Previously students had to know the faculty’s last name in order to search for them.

“The students will hopefully have more accurate information. Faculty are looking at the pages more than they used to and are notifying us when it is correct. We are starting to hear from people telling us we need to update things,” Eyreman said.

The process of constructing the website took two years and nearly half of that time went toward moving to a content management system.

“[Computer management systems] give us the ability to update pages and re-use content without having to put it out there again. It also makes formatting updates easier for programmers,” says Eyreman “It will also allow them to set up a workflow.”

Most large systems are run by a content management system and the old website was not. Eyreman said they worked with ifactory web design firm for a year to help get it set up.

The school is still tweaking the website and moving pages to the new format. Eyreman says the goal is to get everything migrated over by the end of fall. “We are excited to hear what people have to say.”