The Cerritos College Web Standards Committee met to discuss the MyCerritos Web site on Feb. 17.
The committee meets six times a year to discuss what changes need to be made to the Web site.
Depending on the needs of the Web site, sometimes they meet less or more throughout the year.
In the meeting, the committee discussed issues with the home page, changing the design on the home page and the update on the video player.
Ty Bowman, Web administrator and public affairs stated, “There were some minor changes done because there were some issues with the link.”
“The link,” Bowman continued, “didn’t match the link exactly that was on the home page and for some reason, the computers in the Admissions Office were not forwarding to MyCerritos.”
I.T. Manager Patrick O’Donnell stated, “The issue with that was that no one in Admissions or Financial Aid was let known that we were going to make some sort of change. So that became sort of an issue.”
O’Donnell saw the change done without discussion and thought of a solution.
“If we were going to make some changes, we should let people know,” he said.
However, the problem to the MyCerritos home page has been solved and is now running without a problem.
Mark Wallace, chair of the committee and public affairs director said, “We are trying to do some minor redesign that’s going to come along particularly on the left hand column.”
Wallace discussed with the committee that they left-hand column was a mess.
“I don’t like it and we can do it better,” he said.
“Speaking of that,” said Rich Cameron, faculty representative, “in the past we have talked about changing the design and make it stay fresh.”
Cameron thinks that new ideas for the new design should start coming in.
“It’s time to start coming in with new ideas rather than throw them up six months from now,” Cameron said.
Bowman tried to come up with a new design and couldn’t come up with anything.
“I hate to admit it,” Bowman stated, “in the middle of last year, we were thinking of doing that and I went back and forth with the designers and we just got stuck.”
“There have been some minor changes done in the headers since then,” Bowman said.
It is the committee’s responsibility to make sure the Web site is accessible to everyone with disabilities.
They can make sure the Web site is accessible to everyone by putting captions on videos.
“We have a way do captions and that’s all fine but you have to have Windows Media Player installed so not every computer will have that installed, so it’s a universal problem,” Bowman said.
Bowman tried to do something that would be a little more usable and since flash is the player being used everywhere, he thought of flash player as the solution.
“I asked the multimedia department if it can make a custom player for us in flash player that we can use,” he said.
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