Pasadena City College to Update Website after 11 Years With No Major Overhaul

Pasadena City College, home to a Nobel Prize Laureate, rocket scientists, rock stars, sports stars, movie stars and historymakers, is giving its website a complete do-over after 11 years.

The website was last extensively modified in 2003, said Michael Ihrig, PCC’s web administrator and a PCC alumnus in a story published in the PCC Courier, the college’s independent student newspaper.

The update will improve the website’s look and functionality. It will allow the average person to navigate the website easily, and will make the website more user-friendly, especially for first-time students and parents.

Ihrig described the website as the “voice of PCC”. He said the website re-do is aimed at “keeping it accessible and friendly and easy to understand” and is long overdue.

David Steiman, the school’s interim public relations director, agrees saying the website’s remaining unchanged for 11 years is, “… worse than dog years” if you think about it in computer years.

A team of professional web design technicians is preparing to give the PCC website a complete overhaul that will fix glitches bugging the website. These glitches include broken links, navigation and “a misguided search engine”.

A new system called Omni Update (OU) will be used to upgrade the PCC website. PCC will work with a firm called OU Campus in the upgrade.

OU Campus bills itself as “the leading web content management system for higher education institutions”. It said it manages over 700 college and university websites.

PCC looks on the website upgrade as part of its plan to build an information architecture. The information architecture project is expected to take a year to complete.