Union website set for revamp

It was revealed this week that the Students’ Union website is to undergo a total overhaul through this and the next academic year.

The primary feature of this new site will be an interactive calendar including all Union, society and sporting events, and Copper Rooms listings for the coming months. The calendar will complement a new ‘what’s on today’ feature, which will also present new food offers and important news and information for students.

A new ‘job and opportunity’ section will advertise all Union council positions, part-time officers and other ways to get involved in the SU, such as Nightline.

Other features include a redesigned and more specific search box and the end of the website’s two-tiered homepage system, where different information is presented depending on whether a student is logged in or not.

In keeping with a general ambition for more societies to update their own webpages, the new design will give them more potential to customise their own pages in a similar manner to the current website for Varsity XXI; overall, this should enable greater consistency and interaction with the Students’ Union.

This change is in response to a period of widespread student criticism of the website which was highlighted in Rant Week, the opportunity in Week 10 of last term for students to level their complaints about Union activities.

Students claimed that they find the website difficult to navigate when searching for job vacancies and event listings, and second-year Bio-medic Ryan Elkins alleged that “It was getting to the point where the SU website was so difficult to navigate that I almost gave up buying tickets to some events. This could potentially become a revenue issue for the Union.”

The project will require an almost total restructuring of the Union’s IT system and some students already have doubts that this can be achieved cheaply and quickly.

Fourth-year mathematician Liron Speyer argues that “Considering the piecemeal and fragmented state of the current website, I think that all this is fairly ambitious and will take a great deal of maintenance, even once the initial programming has been completed”.

Chris Luck, the Democracy and Communications Officer, is nevertheless confident that with the arrival of a new web developer from February and the greater involvement in societies in maintaining their own webpages, the SU will be able to successfully complete the overhaul. The time frame for this move remains uncertain but the improvements will begin in the near future.

“Everything you could posssibly want to know about your Union will be in one place, at one time. A literal one-stop-shop.” Chris Luck commented.