Updates to Concord University’s website

By: Grace Watson | December 5th October 19, 2019

As a student at Concord University, you are probably familiar with the Concord University website. Beginning in the Spring 2019 semester, the website has gone through several updates with the primary purpose of drawing in new students and using it as a marketing tool to boost student enrollment. This leads to the question of how our current students are impacted by the recent updates to the school’s website; a website that should be for them to use to sign up for classes, log into Blackboard and check their e-mail lacks the functionality required to access these resources.

Carolyn Worley, who is the Administrative Assistant and oversees student workers, updates the Event Calendar and sends out announcement emails, has noticed students have issues navigating the website. Carolyn Worley, herself, acknowledges the website is “not mobile-friendly” and doesn’t work on different search engines like Firefox. However, she admits that everyone’s minds work differently and the website has some forgiving qualities, Worley believes “the featured stories on the front page are a great addition.” However, due to their placement on Concord’s website, they are often overlooked by both current and potential students.

These problems highlight the fact that the website is poorly executed.

As previously mentioned, the website is not mobile-friendly. While the website makes efforts to adapt to students’ and faculty’s physical and mental needs with the addition of the accessibility menu, which allows the user to make the font size bigger and offers the user the option of a read-aloud version of the website, current students were not informed of the website update well enough causing many to be confused regarding how to use Concord University’s website.

Other problems with the website update are that events are only updated once a week on Friday and Carolyn Worley, who oversees the Event Calendar, relies on student organizations and their sponsors to give her accurate information to add to the Event Calendar and there is also the issue of each department being in charge of their own webpage on Concord University’s website. Many professors lacked the credentials and capabilities, such as training, time and resources, to update their pages regularly.

While the recent updates have resulted in small changes to the existing website; there are still technical issues that aggravate students, for instance, in the Spring 2019 semester, the databases could not be accessed off-campus by commuter students. The technical issues regarding the databases existed when the link for off-campus access was disabled for a short time at the end of the semester; the sudden change/update resulted in students failing to find where the databases were located on the J. Frank Marsh Library’s homepage.

One of the primary purposes of the website update was to ultimately act as a marketing tool to attract new students to enroll in Concord University, the website requires a lot of scrolling and there are a lot of links to other resources that any potential student would find confusing. Also, current students are left out of this conversation and are suffering from it. Current students lack access to basic resources, such as email, Blackboard and databases, due to the update being geared to new students.

This would be a non-issue if Concord University would not have only informed students through emails and school-issued memos but also give students an online tour of the new website; this would ultimately help not only current students and faculty but also those interested in attending Concord University. Concord University’s failure to give students adequate notice and a guided tour of the new website has resulted in current students lacking the assistance to maintain their academic goals and educational pursuits.

The focus should not be on potential students but on students that are currently attending Concord University, the website offers students’ a direct link to resources and social events that not only help students adapt to college life but also academically, such as writing workshops.

The reason why the focus should be on current students instead of potential students is that 1) a website will not be a deciding factor in attending a college and 2) current students may decide to transfer to different colleges if they feel their needs aren’t being met.

*This article was written for MCOM 420: SpTop - Mobile Reporting as a soft news story.