On Aug. 23, 2015, Ohio Northern University launched their new branding initiative with an all new website. Great? Actually, not so great. Although the new website is fancy and definitely updated, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done.
One of the major problems is that most of the pages students know and love are down. For example, the Polar Careers center is currently advertising around campus for their career fair on September 17. On the signs you are directed to onu.edu/careers. The thing is this, page doesn’t exist right now.
So why would ONU launch a website that doesn’t even have its Polar Careers link in the right place? I’m not sure. But, in case you were wondering, you can go to https://onu-csm.simplicity.com/ for all your online career needs.
Another thing about this new website is that a lot of the department pages have been messed with, and aren’t as attractive as before. In this new website, it seems like many pages were copy and pasted with a few words changed to fit that department. As a student working on the English department page, I noticed this error that caught my eye.
Either I wasn’t aware that music was something you could graduate from in English, or someone copied this from the music page and just didn’t get all the words changed. It’s almost laughable the little errors that could have been fixed with more time.
Lastly, a big problem with this new website is the fact that the students weren’t informed about the change until it happened. Upperclassmen are just as clueless as freshmen when it comes to the new website because not only were they not informed, but they were not taught how to use it. The poor freshmen just want to learn how to use Moodle, but the upperclassmen may not even know how to use the regular website.
Although there are a lot of problems, I have to give it to the developers. Overhauling the entire ONU website (excluding the College of Law which refused to conform) is quite a feat. The fact that they got all of this done is great, but it doesn’t make it ready. I think that with more time and focus on little details and not just getting it done, the website could have been great from the get-go. But alas, it is up and running. It may seem tedious learning this new website with all its quirks, but it’s ours.
As we are under construction, try to be patient. There over 30,000 pages on ONU’s website and it is going to take a while to fix. It may be rough, but in the end it will be better. Remember you can always report web problems with a button all the way in the bottom left corner when things are glitchy and hopefully things will get solved.