By Hannah Gordon
News Assignment Editor
Students noticed a change when logging on to the St. Bonaventure student portal website this week. On Monday St. Bonaventure updated the My.SBU.edu website to complement the updates made to the university’s website last semester.
Despite the evident change in design, some students barely noticed a difference.
“I saw it, but I didn’t really notice the changes because I have Moodle and my student email downloaded on my phone, so I never really looked at it in the first place,” Tara Flanagan, a freshman journalism and mass communication major, said.
Other students objected to the changes made and don’t think they were necessary.
“I don’t know why they had to change it in the first place,” Shane McNamara, a sophomore strategic communications and digital media major, said. “There wasn’t a problem with it before, and now I don’t really the way it looks.”
The university changed the student portal with the help of Tim Geiger and Mikhail Sudakov, both employees in Enterprise & Web Services group in Technology Services, according to Michael Hoffman, executive director for information technology.
The redesign of the university website was done for three primary reasons, according to Hoffman. The new system saves the university money, makes it more similar in appearance to the university’s new website and makes my.SBU.edu more user friendly for smartphones and other devices.
The new design doesn’t change much regarding layout, according to Hoffman.
“The main new features are the enhanced look and feel, as well as the new mobile-friendly responsive design,” Hoffman said. “Nothing has been lost.”
Joseph Pinter, a junior journalism and mass communication and history major, said he enjoys the new design.
“I haven’t had any problems with the redesign,” Pinter said. “The layout is basically identical. I’ve noticed many people don’t like it, but I really don’t mind.”
Hoffman said he’s impressed with the speed in which the website was redesigned.
“It actually came very quickly,” Hoffman said. “The new website launched in the fall, and the My.SBU.edu redesign, which required reprogramming all of our custom portal screens was completed just a couple of months later. We were completely engaged with the sbu.edu redesign, which meant we weren’t able to work on the MySBU redesign until www.sbu.edu was completely finished.”
Despite not being able to simultaneously work on both websites, Hoffman said the complicated project went smoothly.
“The redesign of MySBU was an incredibly complex project that was completed in a very short amount of time and has gone virtually flawlessly. In my opinion the speed and efficiency of this redesign is a real testament to the Enterprise & Web Services group,” Hoffman said.
gordonhr13@bonaventure.edu
