The Bakersfield College website was recently revamped, updated and released March 17. It has been a project that has taken the Kern Community College District and Sharron Musser approximately two years to complete.
Musser, the web content editor at the BC campus – each KCCD campus now has one – explained the project.
“All of the Kern community campuses were going to get new websites, just to kind of get everything updated,” she said. “A part of the plan was actually to get everything branded more. We have a more professional look, we wanted to make everything more cohesive, and then also within each campus have the website be a better marketing tool.”
Musser added that this project had been the primary reason for her employment. She is the first person to hold the title of Web Content Editor at BC. Preceding that, the site was handled by someone in the IT department, which might help explain why it hadn’t been updated in so long – there was no one charged with the specific task of looking after it. The BC website had previously received its most recent redesign early during the spring semester of 2007. Musser was hired in April of 2012 and began reviewing the site right away.
Aside from Musser, there is a team at the district that did a lot of the back-end development, in fact most of the designing was their job. Together they had to make sure that they came up with something that would work for each campus individually.
They began a series of user testing and surveying to find out what it was exactly that students and website visitors were looking for. To which Musser said, “ I would give them, ‘Find this item,’ or ‘find the catalog,’ and see if how I laid things out made sense, because things made sense to me, but it’s more important for it to make sense to the students. So we’ve done a lot of reiterations of it, a lot of tweaking to it.”
Musser added that a couple of student government representatives were invited to the testing. There was also a series of pop-up surveys that many students and faculty members might recall. The online survey began by asking who you were, what the purpose for the usage was and then asking for basic feedback on the website itself.
Through that research, the KCCD district team for the website came up with a design and adjusted any features and pages. They also made sure web-forms, sides, and the menu tab were functioning properly while Musser’s priority was taking the actual content and putting it onto the new site.
“So most of the web development itself happens at the district, but I kind of make sure it works for our campus. I tell them if there is something we need and I make sure all of content gets updated, stays updated,” she said.
The web content editor is also in charge of the placement of the tabs as well as the information and links that go with them. According to Musser, the best placement for everything is still an ongoing process, and she said, “Obviously we can’t survey everybody who is going to use the site so we had to just have select groups. Now everybody can use it … I want people to feel very comfortable. Send me an email.”
Musser also said the next update may be within the next couple of weeks and the feedback they receive will be the basis for that. Currently, some site viewers feel the sliders on the front page are going too fast.
They are running at seven seconds and will instead change to 12 seconds. Huge updates to the website are not going to be made again at once anytime soon. Doing so may cause the website to crash, and Musser says, “We want to make sure that it doesn’t affect as many students.”
Musser’s goals also included updating the technology of the website and de-cluttering it.
“I had to kind of go through and tweak some of that,” Musser said. “We also had a lot of things that were probably not very useful, and were kind of just cluttering things.”
The BC website went from having around eight or nine tabs to a more simpler four. Although Musser said the task was “tricky,” she said a lot of it was old mission statements and employee links.
Faculty and staff have emailed asking where certain forms went and Musser replied, “I just let them know it’s all still there. It’s just a security thing. It’s better to have the forms that only employees are going to use where only employees can get to. That way we can make sure you’re only seeing the things that you are supposed to see. Like a key request, some random person doesn’t have to know how to request a key for Bakersfield College.
“That’s something that only employees or students would need,” she said. “So that’s something only accessible to employees or students.”
Freeing up the space enables more of the website to be used for information current and incoming students need.
“That’s what we’re focusing on,” Musser said. “We’re also trying to focus a lot on the outside community, showing the community what we have here, the events the activities, the great things our students their students are doing, and before we weren’t as able to do that as much.”
Other problems, aside from the slider images and link movements, have been links failing to work under certain browsers, finding a place for announcements, and students being unable to find the InsideBC tab.
The tab in question is located in the upper right hand corner, next to the search engine bar. Musser says she plans on making it bigger.
Overall, Musser feels the feedback has been positive and said, “It feels more real, more professional.” For many this is the first contact with BC, and Musser added, “We want them to know we are doing more, students are doing amazing things, and I think our old website didn’t represent that as well.”
Musser strongly encourages any students, faculty members, and employees with any questions or concerns to contact her through her BC email or the one found on the site, [email protected].