Editorial: MHCC website needs a recycling program or dumpster

It is hard to imagine researching a topic without using the Internet.

The Internet has become an immensely useful resource when searching a veritable plethora of topics. As journalists and communicators, we at The Advocate find ourselves using a multitude of Internet sites for various research reasons. As most of our articles focus primarily on the MHCC campus and community, we use the MHCC website as a resource as well.

In our years using the MHCC website, both as students and journalists, we have come time and again to find the website lacking.

Our main areas of annoyance with the MHCC website stem from the inefficient means of searching on the website and the typically outdated posts as well as an overall clunky and cluttered layout of the website.

In order to highlight the problem areas of the MHCC website, several editors took a virtual tour of the websites of the two closest community colleges: Clackamas Community College (CCC) and Portland Community College (PCC).

CCC’s website was a refreshing change for a college website. It was cleanly and clearly designed, with the prominent areas of the website displaying a slider showcasing important or interesting information for students, a large link for prospective students to register, a small but enlargeable calendar of events, easily navigable tabs for more detailed information as well as links to their social media outlets, including a YouTube channel with multiple videos pertaining to student life, campus events and scholarship tutorials.

The MHCC website’s home page is a conglomerate of new and old campus news, an ad for summer enrollment, an “MHCC People” section full of information on past students as well as outdated human interest stories. The links for social media are on the very bottom of the home page. In addition, instead of having a quick and easy link for prospective students, the MHCC website has a large link for donations.

The links and tabs to other information on the CCC website tend to be more detailed and easier to navigate than their MHCC counterparts. For example, the advising page on CCC’s website breaks down what their advisers can help you with, what students will need to bring with you for a successful advising session as well as what would constitute a drop-in visit versus an appointment with their advising center. They also provide links to other useful information, thus keeping their page easy to read and not cluttered. The MHCC website, in contrast, lumps all advising information on one page in long paragraph form with one list of services near the top and a smattering of links sifted into the paragraphs. At a glance, the MHCC website feels like it should have a Reddit-style “Too Long, Don’t Read” summary while the CCC website is simple and forthright with their pertinent information.

Another area that the CCC website excels in is their calendar of events. MHCC’s website breaks the events into several different areas of the college, none of which overlap, including the College Master Calendar, which seemingly only lists the dates and times that places on campus such as the Bookstore and College Salon open and close, which doesn’t change often enough to warrant such detailed exposure, while student life events like the Chill Out event put on Student Activities Board (SAB) did not warrant a mention. In contrast, the CCC calendar of events shows a month-by-month breakdown with events that vary from theater productions, cultural presentations and student workshops. In addition, each event has a scroll-over window that gives basic event information as well as a link for more information and a download calendar event for personal calendars.

Another small, but relatively important, difference between the two websites is the ability to click on the name of the college and have it direct you back to the home page. CCC’s website allows for this, MHCC’s does not.

Taking a trip through the PCC website, we found that their website was much more organized, having most things alphabetically ordered and it didn’t require more than two or three minutes of searching. There were no face-palms made out of frustration of not being able to find what you wanted within the first few tries, as is frequent on the MHCC website.

Although not as visually appealing as the CCC website, the PCC website is user-friendly. When one logs onto the MHCC website you are overloaded with more old stories that were written in April and feature information on past students than you would ever want to see. On the PCC website, there is so much valuable information being offered on a platter to users that after looking at the PCC website it is almost hard to go back to the cruel reality that is the MHCC website, with its most important information being buried behind less important “fluff.”

On the whole, we found the MHCC website to be poorly designed compared to the websites of PCC and CCC.

We would like the people who run the MHCC website to consider these few suggestions to make the MHCC website more attractive and user-friendly: a less cluttered layout that focuses on the most important and interesting information for current and future students; a more integrated, updated and easily navigable calendar of events; more concise and precise information on the pages of the website with more links to related information; and a more robust social media outlet for students.

This may seem like we are just bashing the MHCC website. However, we sincerely want the MHCC website to grow and achieve the potential and showcase the talent on campus.