The Bakersfield College website has seen a major overhaul and it should not go unnoticed. The website is definitely cleaner and modern looking now, but it seems like some important resources have been thrown to the back burner in order for the school to do some serious self-promotion. Is the website just a bunch of bells and whistles or is it really useful?
What takes center stage is a huge, half-page, scrolling slideshow that shows upcoming events happening at BC. This is a good thing, but the photos they have scrolling aren’t the best and make it look like a kid put it together.
If you are going to have something like this take up a majority of your website, then you need to make sure it looks the best. With BC having a fine arts photography program and a journalism program that has photo classes, surely they could get someone to take better pictures for the website.
The color scheme is more neutral and uses our school colors as more of an accent, which works well and isn’t as in your face as the previous version of the website.
Along the top, there are fewer, and more simplified, choices, which make it better to navigate the core of the website, but at the cost of some of the options being buried in menus and taking more than just one click to get to them.
Does the new website help us or does it hinder us from easily accessing our basic services we need as students? Yes and no.
The bottom half of the page is where most of the information is located, including the calendar and the social media buttons. The calendar is such a confusing jumble that it’s almost an afterthought. It does include the student events, but the way they are formatted is really confusing.
The best part of the website is that the bottom section has panels. All four panels – current students, future students, community, and alumni – are geared to a certain group of people, so it makes the website more customized depending on your reason for visiting the website.
InsideBC is getting a big promotion with this update. Over the past couple of semesters, professors have really been pushing this down our throats and with good reason because it centralizes all of the information a student needs while taking classes here. So, the incorporation of this into the website really helps make it easier to use this service, instead of fighting with the older banweb portal.
For current students, the website is a breath of fresh air and is actually a website to be proud of. The last one seemed so old school and made the college look second-rate. Over time, we think the website will come full circle and be a place to get all the information students need, without being overly simplified.
So, if you haven’t visited the new website, you should at least check it out and see how much better it is compared to the old one.