With consent from blogmaster PhiloDave, this is a special edition of Website Wednesday that will appear from time to time over the course of the semester. The focus will be our newly designed HWC website, and the CCC website in general, in an effort to give the folks at District some feedback on what we believe to be working or not working with the sites.
Where to begin? Well, a bit o’ history might be helpful. Go to this post and read all the replies to get all caught up on some initial feedback on the reinvented webpages. You’ll note that Audrey Berns, Executive Director-Web Services at CCC responded and made changes per our comments. (Thanks again, Audrey!)
Now, if you have somethin’ nice to say, let Audrey know. If you’d like to see some changes (major or just tweaks), make a comment. Anonymity encouraged. If you see some problems or concerns, say so. District, Audrey specifically, listened once and I do believe she’d listen again.
So, have at it peeps! You’ve accessed the pages. What do you think? Your students are viewing them. What have they told you? Tolle Blege!
The Harold Lounge 
Thanks to my trusty google alert, which notifies me whenever the words “Harold Lounge” and “Website” appear in the same post, I am all over this. (Actually I am a loyal subscriber).
Yes, I do want to hear your feedback. I also wanted to preemptively tell you about two changes that we are making as a result of faculty feedback over the last few weeks:
I learned from the last faculty council meeting that faculty had been linking to specific pages on the old site from their syllabi, and that the switch to the new site broke these links. While there was no way we could have redirected each page on the old site to the corresponding page on the new site, I understand the need for a better solution. Therefore, we are going to create “permalinks” of sorts, nice, easy to remember links for common pages, which faculty can put on syllabi, blackboard courses, etc, which will continue to work even if we decide to scrap the website in a year and just start using a WordPress blog. So far, I’m planning to create “easy links” for the following resources:
Class Schedule
Academic Catalog
Academic Calendar
Policies
If there are others that you use frequently and would like an easy link for, please let me know. The above links are district-wide, but these could be college specific, i.e. ccc.edu/haroldlounge
The other feedback I’ve heard from more than one faculty member is that it is difficult to find the academic departments at each college. I agree, and to rectify that we are going to create a new Department page called Academic Departments. It will be one of the first departments to display under the Department directory under About Us, and will contain the Department name, linking to that department page, the department chair, and possibly the subdisciplines. We will add this link to the Academics drop-down navigation with the title Academic Departments.
Finally, I want to mention that we are working a new online staff directory, which will contain every active CCC employee, and be updated on a nightly basis to add new employees and remove inactive employees. The directory will display basic fields pulled from PeopleSoft, such as name, email, title, etc, but it will also contain a user-maintained section for things like photo, office hours, and a bio/greeting. Each employee will have access to edit his/her own profile through a user interface that we are developing, not connected to PeopleSoft. There was a similar tool on the old CCC website, but participation was voluntary, and therefore the directory was always incomplete. The new tool will contain a basic record, pulled from PeopleSoft, regardless of whether or not an employee chooses to enhance their record with a user maintained fields. One question I’ve been pondering..should we encourage the format of the bio/greeting to be in 1st person or 3rd person? I.e. “Hello, I have been teaching English for the past 30 years” Or, “Professor Jane Smith holds a doctorate in biochemistry and was a awarded the coveted Jenkins fellowship in Neuroscience…” The latter sounds more professional, but the former might be more wam and inviting. What do you think?
Audrey,
The new “unified” CCC website is indeed an improvement over the old “do your own thing” at the several colleges.
There is a link under the Faculty & Staff pull down that appears to be broken : Employee Portal : portal.intranet.co.ccc.edu
(Or, does it only work on campus? If so, maybe that explanation could be added?)
About the bio / greeting on the employee field — If it’s written by the employee, then it should be in the first person. (Why would I write about myself in the 3rd person?) If it’s written in the 3rd person, it could come off as being written by a college official. That’s fine if it’s just the facts: “Professor Jane Smith holds a doctorate in biochemistry”. However, if it veers into a subjective area: “Professor Jane Smith believes that every student majoring in biochemistry will have a successful and rewarding career”, then this could lead to some misunderstandings.
Of course, as with any user-maintained field, the user is the one who will ultimately decide what to write.
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your reply.
Yes, portal.intranet.co.ccc.edu only works on campus. We’ll have to figure out a better way to note that.
AB
You rock Audrey! Here I thought our faculty would lead with questions and you would follow with answers. Yet it is you who’ve taken a leading role in providing us with updates. Just. Plain. Nice!
I have been giving the site a test drive these past couple of weeks, and so far it’s been OK. I did however conduct a search on our college’s mission statement and was taken to this link:
http://www.ccc.edu/colleges/washington/Pages/Search-Results.aspx?q=mission+statement
I don’t mind knowing about the library’s mission, but what about our HWC Mission?
Are the searches based on tags embedded in the HTML code, or are the links being constructed manually? Just wondering.
Thanks in advance!
Realist,
Thanks for your reply! In answer to your question, we are using the magic of google search to index our site content and provide search results. A quick check reveals that the HWC Mission does not include the word Statement, which is why it did not come up in your search. If you just type in Mission, it pops up first, with the Library’s page coming in 3rd. http://ccc.edu/colleges/washington/Pages/Search-Results.aspx?q=mission
If you were concerned, you could speak with your leadership about adding the word Statement somewhere on the HWC Mission page.
Hope that helps,
AB
That does help, Audrey. I hope our HWC leadership is reading this post.
Thank you!
Ms. Berns,
The Digital Multimedia Design has a program website featuring a ton of student work ( which helps with our enrollment and provides our students a showcase for their work). The site has been a great resource for students who want to learn about specific DMD classes and view work by students from the class. We also provide job resources and tips for resume preparation and portfolio creation on our site. We were linked via the Art Dept. on the old HW site, but are not linked on the new site.
Is there any way that you could provide a link on the DMD program page?
Thanks
Rose Divita
Coordinator/ Asst. Prof. Digital Multimedia Design Program
Dear Professor Divita,
It sounds like a great resource, and a most appropriate link for your department and program pages. Since you signed your name I’ve got your email and will contact you directly. Thanks,
AB
Just a quick note to let you know we’ve created the following shortcuts for popular pages:
http://www.ccc.edu/academiccalendar
http://www.ccc.edu/classschedules
http://www.ccc.edu/policies
http://www.ccc.edu/academiccatalog
Also, under the Academics navigation drop-down for each college, you’ll now find a link to Academic Departments:
http://ccc.edu/colleges/washington/departments/Pages/Academic-Departments.aspx
AB