9 October 2018
Israel Wheatley
In my time at UCCS, I’ve gone back and forth on why staying here is both good and bad for me. What finally made me stay was UCCS’ passion and potential for innovation and growth, so why was our website so seemingly outdated?
A university’s homepage says so much about its values. Since I’ve been here, our website’s boring, unintuitive and rough-around-the-edges design deterred me from doing anything online. Even before starting college, I was pretty unimpressed by the site (one reason why UCCS was my last choice).
Now…the smoothness…the glowing color scheme…the flowing drop-downs… it’s all amazing. Simply wonderful. The design is actually aesthetically pleasing. For once, I feel like UCCS has reached the cyber-accessibility level of top-universities, whose entire images are displayed on their homepages – literally and figuratively speaking.
Take, for example, Purdue, Yale and even the University of Kansas. All these universities have user-friendly and attractive websites. Now, personally, I wouldn’t want to live in either Indiana or Kansas (no offense to these states, I’m from Kansas myself), but I would – and almost did – attend one of these universities. Their qualities show in their presentations.
Those reasons aside, it actually works well on mobile. And, let’s be real, using our phones to go online is way more convenient than pulling out a laptop or logging into a library desktop. Having a streamlined mobile version of a website is simply a necessity at this point, whether we like it or not.
UCCS is a fantastic school, and I don’t regret staying here. Some of our programs, like Film Studies, are highly ranked on a national level. Given that, we should at least do something simple to show off our school, like, improve our website. And we have.
I’m all for this new version, and I am not ashamed! Keep it up, UCCS.