The Center of Student Enrichment recently unveiled an upgrade to the website for the NMU events calendar, which now features Student Connect and the Campus Connect newsletter.
Campus Connect, aimed at publicizing campus-wide news and events, along with Student Connect, aimed at publicizing student happenings such as sports games and film showings, both received a face lift.

According to Derek Hall, assistant vice president of Marketing and Communications, the website was updated for the Student Enrichment Center, its top users.

Rachel Harris, director of the center for student enrichment, underlined the need to change the website.

“It came out five times a week last year which was way too frequent, and it would have repeated information, like ‘register your bike’, three times in a week. It annoyed everybody,” She said. “The numbers were dismal in terms of how many people were reading it, and it was very frustrating. We had to talk to Marketing and Communication and say ‘we need to fix this.’”

The usability of the website was expanded dramatically and now has a more open concept, including tabs for events, announcements and news.

The announcement page reminds students of application deadlines, times for sorority and fraternity recruitment, sports tryouts, and other notices such as maintenance and personnel changes. The news section of the campus connect web page features media advisories while the student connect features a volunteer tab for students to explore different volunteer opportunities on and off campus.

Superior Edge Volunteer Center Coordinator Gwyneth Harrick explained the development of the volunteer tab.

“We have been investing a lot of time in having continual meetings in order to get that volunteer tab up and running so that volunteer opportunities can be more accessible to students,” Harrick said.

Harrick held focus groups to get further ideas about how the volunteer tab will function. She said that soon, Superior Edge students will be able to tell which edge the volunteer events apply to.

The website also newly features “places to go,” where students can get descriptions about popular locations around Marquette. Browsers can also view the academic calendar from the website along with a general calendar that displays the events happening on campus when looking at the main events page. The number of events and announcements are located on the side of the main page, where visitors are able to see the number of emergency announcements, sports games, volunteer opportunities and more.

Harris noted that the traffic to the website will increase in the future. She said that previously, less than 100 students out of the entire student body read the announcements per month.

“I think it’s going to take off,” Harris said. “It’s going to take a little bit of time, but once people see that there’s some usefulness to it, it’s more user friendly and the information is there, that’s going to be the one place that people go to. I think it’s going to get used and will only continue to get better and better.”

The upgraded website can be viewed at events.nmu.edu.