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The Disease of School Websites |
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..........I have visited a lot of college websites lately, and for the most part, I have been very disappointed. So many of these sites are difficult to use; possibly even bordering on impossible. Even technology schools are not exempt from this horrid and unthinkable crime. Not only do I find this appalling and frustrating, but this is such a wide-spread epidemic that eliminating from the possible schools using a reasonably usable website as a factor would dwindle any list to almost nothing; so little that it leave no other deciding factors, and possibly not enough options. ..........This last school, of which I have submitted the supplement, SAT scores, transcript and a few other ideas, leaving only the application itself, has a particularly nasty example. The common app, I found out hours within submitting my supplement, requires certain things to be done in a certain way, which requires lies. This ticks me off in itself because you have to do a signature thing that is all legally binding that everything is true. WELL IT WAS. About a week later I get a paper application from them in the mail, cool. I fill it out, with slight penmanship errors and then later, using commonapp information, in pencil. It turns out that the website of this school requires a login for anything in the way of their application, and as far as I got, it was online-only, no printing. According to my sources, white-out on an application isn't good, but at this point I doubt I give a flying s**t. I stopped the account creation process when it began asking for application information (odd) that, of course, were things I could not reply to, or that it wouldn't allow me to do so truthfully. ..........At the websites of other schools it was worse. There was one school where I had a hard time just finding the application information page. I'm not sure if I ever did. I know there was a website that was so horrible that I just gave up and crossed the school off. At the courses-only school I'm in, I can't stand the website when looking for courses for the upcoming semester. I'll try for a few hours a couple of times, but I just can't do any more than that. I have to have someone else do it, get paper information, or kill the computer and hope it passes the message onto the web designers. ..........Sometimes I truly fear the future of humans, or at least the effects that our stupidity as a whole will inflict upon the rest of this planet's species. Would not the most cost effective and simplest way to build, maintain, repair and improve a website be to have the students of web design courses do the work? Have upper-level classes, or their teachers check that the programs will work, perhaps through test servers. The upper-level students could also work on the more difficult aspects, like databases, speed, performance, and integrating the new bits into the existing site. There could even be massive sessions at the start of each term or few years to discuss with the students the places of the site that could use or need improvements and bounce around ideas on how to best enact those suggestions. A revamp of the website would require most of the classes to participate, so major upgrades would have to start at one of these meetings. More realistically, just give each level or class a section, to redo as a class project or homework. A class project where everyone is in charge of a page might work, but all plans are subject to glitches and bugs, exploitable or not, even on Gaia with millions of testers. Then again, it is those very testers that exploit them, or accidentally crash a network of servers with them. ..........College and university websites are really shitty, difficult to use, and are a hazard to personal computers. They have a resource that would pay or is paying, and perfectly willing to fix the websites. It is a disgrace to the students of the school, insulting to perspective students, and a ridiculously unnecessary occurrence given resources. Just because this problem is rampant, does not make it okay or alright to continue the trend. Refusing to support such an atrocity to our generation is impossible given the circumstances, therefore it will not recede or become repaired merely to survive, because the issue is too wide-spread to simply have enough people choose against schools that support such a deep insult to this age in society. Even as someone who does not have a cellular telephone, and sees texting as pointless and as a move backwards in technological evolution, I find such blatant neglect to such an important tool utterly disrespectful for all prospective and current students, faculty, and innocent passerby.
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..........This apparent decline in entry length is worrisome. The decline is gradual which only further legitimizes my fear. I fear that this decline will continue until I have no recent entries, and that the entries will become meaningless as even an exercise or form of expression. I can only hope that by realizing this may bring about longer entries, and curb or put off, at least for a bit longer, the inevitable demise of this journal from lack of new entries.
Metalic_Noodles · Wed Feb 25, 2009 @ 05:59am · 0 Comments |
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