City College website continues steady improvements
Broken links from the old website are soon to be fixed
Desktop displaying the newly designed City College website and a broken link that used to contain information about City Times on the old website. By Brian Mohler/City Times
March 6, 2019
Designing new website content can come with some discontent.
Since the new San Diego City College website launch, the discontent has been web searches with broken links from the old site.
City Times previously reported the website was redesigned to be more user-friendly for students, but students are still reporting trouble with broken links.
“I got a 404 server error message when I was searching for the class schedule,” said Jose Carrillo, a psychology student.
Commercial music student Angel Bello said he got the same error message when searching for the campus events calendar.
But those broken link issues will soon be fixed and the homepage of the new website is designed to access any information within two clicks, including the campus events calendar on the homepage.
City Times spoke with webmaster, Victor Chen, and information officer, Cesar Gumapas, regarding the broken links.
“We’ve submitted a new sitemap but it can take Google time in spidering out content from the old website,” said Chen. “Spidering is reindexing the information for the entire site based on the new content.”
Chen said he thinks the broken links should be fixed within a couple weeks.
“We’ve received a lot of positive feedback about the site being more student-focused,” Gumapas said. “We’ve been training departments and organizations to update information so it’s more accessible to students.
“We’re still doing some edits as we get feedback from vice presidents, deans and faculty.”
Gumapas became the City College information officer at the start of the semester but Chen has been updating and troubleshooting the new website for the past four months.
“We’ve been helping with current content for departments but eventually each department should be able to update the information on their own pages,” said Chen.
“It’s been a challenge to work with all the departments and meet training needs but the new site is a huge upgrade,” said Gumapas. “We’re able to get rid of tons of confusing links from the old homepage and the new site will be more search engine optimized.”
Added Chen: “The new site is also much more accessible to people with disabilities.”
