EMMA SMILLIE
GRAPHIC DESIGNER
KYLE CHOKAS
STAFF WRITER
2/12/2024
With this new school year came a brand-new website. The Alma College site, which hadn’t been updated in years, got a refreshing makeover but with it came a plethora of issues such as numerous pages no longer existing and important resources that are important for current students are no longer available.
Through an anonymous poll on the social media platform YikYak, students were able to voice some of their experiences with the new website such as no longer being able to access certain staff directories, find the catalog for programs of study and how there is no longer a resource to help students learn to connect their device to the internet.
Alma College has won two awards for the new site, receiving gold at the HMR Publishing Group’s 11th Annual Educational Digital Marketing Award and receiving from the Davey Awards, which focuses on digital marketing, media and advertisements.
“Updating a site of our size is an extensive process. We are grateful for the patience of all of our site’s users and are continuously working to address any issues as we are made aware of them,” says Melinda Booth, the Vice President of Communications and Marketing.
Despite this, students are frustrated by the fact that they can no longer access the housing or parking portals on the student access Inside Alma portal. With these broken links and websites, students have voiced how troubling it can be:
“The Alma College website has a fresh new design that has a hollow structure; for example, whenever I go to the library website to help students locate books, their link takes me to a dead end and we have to start over,” said Jayden Jones (‘27). Jones expressed her frustrations in how the new site has made her job increasingly difficult.
Students can’t access the student portals that they used to be able to access and when they try, they’re met with 404 Error Codes. A 404 error code usually comes up for internet users when a server is unavailable or being hidden for maintenance, but the site was updated in the fall of 2023 and there are still resources that are unavailable for people currently enrolled at Alma.
The site has become difficult for many current students to use as it isn’t made for current students and is instead used for promoting the school to donors, prospective students and their families, and other schools. Though shiny and flashy, the site has many broken links and have stranded the students from useful resources such as housing information, the library catalogs, and other information.
“It’s impacted me as a student because it forces me to have to put off some things in order to ask around about how to do what I have to do, which adds to [the] stress and generally makes me want to pull my hair out,” Kia Blysniuk (‘25).
Booth encourages students who have any concerns or issues with the new site, to reach out to IT and report the issue with the broken link. You can find the IT department by going to the Inside Alma portal, clicking the Technology tab and selecting the IT Help Desk. There, they can find resources to report issues and concerns that they may have with the new site.
Overall the new site, while shiny and flashy, is a broken mess of error codes, missing links and a maze to navigate for current Alma College students and staff.
