Today's students and faculty expect quality website

By Oscar Gonzalez | Pulse Staff Reporter

As technology grows exponentially, the need for a quality college website has become a necessity. Whether you’re a new student or current student, alamo.edu needs to be user-friendly to benefit everyone.

Web traffic aggregate site, compete.com, estimates that the months leading up to the beginning of fall and spring semester, alamo.edu receives more than 140,000 hits each month. The traffic comes from new and returning students who are enrolling into classes, paying their tuition bills or finding general information about all of the Alamo Colleges.

To handle that amount of traffic, alamo.edu needs to be user-friendly. It needs to make searching for what book is used in a nursing class only available at St. Philip’s College to be just as easy as registering 18 hours of courses at Palo Alto College minutes before the cutoff for the fall semester.

“It’s a little overwhelming at first, but once you take a few minutes, you realize that all the information you need is there within a few clicks,” said future student Chris Morales, 35. “Although I can’t enroll for courses right now, within an hour I was able to submit my application, find out my degree plan and see what books I could be using for next semester.”

Morales is part of the growing trend of adults who are returning to college to learn new job skills. In the case of Morales, his employer, a local medical warehouse, wants him to take over a new position in the company that requires more knowledge about computers. Graduating from high school in 1997, Morales took two semesters of courses at San Antonio College before he left to work a full-time job in Austin. He is the common example of an average computer user trying to enroll into college the new digital way.

For current students and staff, however, the site may not seem as user-friendly, but there is a group within the Alamo Colleges striving to make alamo.edu more efficient for the students, faculty and staff. The Alamo Colleges’ Digital Communication Subcommittee meets every three weeks to discuss any issues with the website.

“All topics discussed are based on feedback from students, faculty and the campus webmasters…The Digital Subcommittee will decide all major updates and changes that will affect all the Alamo Colleges websites,” said Leroy Ibarra, IT senior digital media specialist.

For those who do have issues with the site, Ibarra recommends sending feedback by going to the “Contact Us” link at the bottom of the homepage and clicking on the “Website Comments or Questions” located at http://www.alamo.edu/pac/contact-us/.

In this digital age, where the Internet is essential to people’s lives, having a quality website is paramount for an institution of higher learning. Gone are the days where students waited in a line for hours to enroll in classes or pay for their tuition. In its stead is one website to handle all those tasks. Alamo.edu is designed to benefit everyone at the Alamo Colleges, but it’s not perfect yet. By working together, the students, faculty and staff can help make the site a worthwhile tool for all.