Barton County Community College will roll out a new website by the end of the year, according to the college’s webmaster, Samantha Stueder.
“Our last design was about six years ago,” Stueder told the BCC Board of Trustees on Thursday at the monthly study session. At present, the website has 10,000 pages and is managed by more than 80 web editors. The future site will be streamlined and with fewer editors will also be more consistent in appearance. It will also cost less to maintain.
Dean of Information Services Charles Perkins said the college servers receive more than 1 million hits a day, although most of those are filtered out by the electronic firewall that stops hackers from all over the world. He’s seen attempts to hack into the system from China, Russia, India and the Philippines, among others.
On the subject of the new website, Perkins said it will actually be several sites, each designed for its intended audience. In addition to the core site, there are sites for military students, occupational safety classes, BartOnline and the college foundation, for example.
“If you go to the military site it will make sense to a military student,” he said.
There will also be an internal website that can only be accessed by faculty and staff.
Communication was a recurring theme Thursday. The trustees also heard from Mike Cox, a history instructor at the Fort Riley campus and president of the Faculty Council. Improved communication between faculty and campuses is part of the council’s vision. To reach this goal, the council has created an electronic communication shell, or online archive, to give instructors at any location access to policies and other information in one location.
Trustees also heard from Julie Muden, coordinator of video and multimedia, on the growing use of video and social media in marketing. Barton now has over 500 videos on YouTube, offered a live steaming video of this year’s graduation, and has close to 2,000 “likes” on its Facebook page.
Director of Public Relations Brandon Steinert presented an early draft of the annual Community Report, an informational booklet mailed to about 500 people in the college’s service area. The publication will come out Oct. 1 and is also a tool for communicating the college’s accomplishments to the public.