The Simpson College website has been outdated for a while, with empty links, missing photos and ineffective search functions that make maneuvering the site difficult for everyone, not just students.
At face value, the website looks good, enticing even. The landing page lays out the perks of Simpson and some of our bragging rights. But once you click on anything to get more information, that’s where the issue lies.
If you want to know more about Simpson, it brags about its core values that were reassessed over three years ago and haven’t been touched since. In those three years, the college has seen three separate presidents in leadership. Shouldn’t our core values be re-evaluated with each president?
On top of this, the faculty and staff page has missing photos, pages for people who have left or recently retired and inconsistency on whose photo is up to date. For example, some new arrivals this semester have already been added to the page, however, Spencer Waugh’s photo is outdated, and Amy Jeffery-Kennel doesn’t have a photo at all.
For us as journalists, things like this can be frustrating because we regularly use the website for information on faculty and staff. Imagine wanting to get in contact with someone and having to search for twenty minutes, only to find no office listed, an outdated title or someone who no longer holds that position.
And once you really get into the nitty-gritty of the website, you’ll come across buttons that lead to nowhere, if you can even find them. Each page is information overload.
Even if you happen to come across something you think might be useful, you find that it is out of date. One of the most embarrassing features of the website is that when you look through the requirements for majors and minors, you’ll find outdated PDFs that include classes that either aren’t required for certain majors anymore, or classes that simply don’t exist anymore, but that’s only if the PDF is there in the first place.
Picture this: you’re interested in switching to a political science major. You’ve decided to become a lawyer, and you think that’s a good major for you. So you go to the internal website, search up political science and click on the full-course offering. You will find a PDF from 2019 that doesn’t have the correct requirements.
In addition to this, you won’t find any mention of Simpson’s legal studies minor, which became official last year and is still missing from the website. Guess Simpson won’t be recruiting any future lawyers until the website is updated.
This is across all majors, so how do students know what classes they’re actually going to take? They shouldn’t have to wait for their advisors to say, “Actually… that’s not up to date.”
How many educational opportunities have been missed out on because of obsolete classes and major information? How many more will be missed over the course of the next year as the website gets rebuilt?
Recently, a survey was sent out to students to get their input as they prepare to “redesign our institutional website.” However, this process is slated to take a year, not finishing until the fall of 2024. Until then, we will be left with the inconsistencies and incompetence.
