Students will soon be able to do room selection entirely online, an improvement that comes as part of a campus-wide push to update Boston University’s website.
Office of Residence Life Director David Zamojski said online housing selection should be ready sometime in the next several years, after incremental steps in that direction.
“Entering freshmen and transfer students will be able to sign up this year,” he said.
The move is just a small piece of greater project to improve about 10,000 of the university’s pages, according to Networked Information Services Director Richard Mendez.
“We’ve known for a long time that the BU site was outdated,” he said. “We are building some sites and redesigning others.”
While the BU site has already revamped some of the university’s 200,000 pages, Mendez said he hopes to update 10,000 “core” websites by the end of the summer.
A new Student Central site features a calendar of campus events, links to university resources and menus from local restaurants, Mendez said. The Student Central site also conforms to the new style BU is adopting for all core sites.
After numerous complaints from alumni, the web-based alumni directory has also expanded its listing, according to Alumni Relations Manager of New Media Amy Albrecht. The old design listed only those alumni who registered for the service and posted information themselves, she said. Now the directory includes all alumni unless they request to be removed.
“The first thing that needed to be changed and simplify was the directory,” Albrecht said. “Before, alumni were frustrated because they wouldn’t be able to find a friend or their old roommate.”
After the changes in December, the directory entries soared from 11,778 alumni to more than 248,000, she said.
The new design also allows former and current students to post job information and résumés online.
Student and faculty comments drove most of the changes, Mendez said.
“Many of things we’re updating and changing was a direct result of feedback we got,” he said. “We certainly always keep in mind all input we get.”
The changes range from specific improvements to sweeping changes across all of BU’s pages.
“Just like any other university, there is a different look and feel for each school and department,” he said. “This ranges from fonts to style, but there are unified navigational styles for each top-level site.”
Mendez said the similarities will include a common layout, drop menus and fewer graphic-based pages. BU chose the new unified format because it will make sites easier to navigate and maintain, Mendez said.
“We do not work in isolation with the rest of the university,” he said. “It is a coordination of many offices and departments. Departments will continue to design their sites to fit their needs. [However,] if it’s part of the core then it should follow our design.”
BU’s website first launched in June 1993 and was one of the first 125 websites on the planet, Mendez said. Today, 1.5 million people load BU sites each month, he added.
“The whole world is moving onto the web,” he said. “I can’t imagine a university without a website.”