Whatcom’s Tangled Web

by Katy Kappele

For those of you who know me, this will come as no surprise.  I have been seen ranting in full foam-flecked, red-faced, panting glory at the new website.  “You great bleeping blob of bleep!” I can be heard to shout, desperately clutching at my chest     in order to cease the website-induced palpitations in my heart.  Boy, I think, am I glad school administrators are taught CPR.  Too bad the computer will never recover from the fist I am about to put through its bright little face. 

    So, in case you have not figured out how I feel from the above paragraph, the new Whatcom website is not my favorite thing in the world.  In fact, one might say it gives me fits, or that I hate its mechanized guts.  Either works, I’m not picky.

    That being said, all I want from a website is the ability to find something on it, and that that something works, and that it installs no malware on my computer.  All the new Whatcom website needs is some debilitating virus to make it perfect. 

    Being the generally congenial, bright, gently humorous person I am, I happen to have spoken with others about the website.  Even the faculty doesn’t like it.  Teachers say that it is difficult to find their websites when they search for them.  They don’t like how hard it is to find the staff directory. 

    I, too, find it both difficult and annoying finding the staff directory, and that is the least of my problems with the website.  Arguably the thing I hate most is the bar at the sort-of-top-of-the-site that tells students to ask a question, any question.  Okay, I think, if I can’t find the theft reports after an hour of looking for them on this stupid website, I’ll ask someone where I can find it.  Well, sure enough, the questions bar goes to admissions, and they have no idea how to answer my question, or, for that matter, any of my questions.  I asked, “how do I connect to the internet?”  It didn’t know.  I asked “how do I enroll in chemistry?” (a question, I might add, it did know the answer to, but it was very difficult to find!) The site sent me to a page where I had the option of clicking on OASIS or opening a PDF document.  Not helpful. 

    So, I thought, that’s okay.  I can understand, a person wrote this whole website.  I don’t know how to write a website.  I can understand.  I’ll just write a very polite, helpful letter to the poor person who went to all this trouble to design what he thought would be a nice website.  So I scrolled to the bottom and saw that the website was designed by Moving Pixel Productions.  Not a person, a company.  A company should know what it’s doing!

    So I rage, in flushed-faced apoplexy, in computer labs, on my laptop, at home, and in class at the website I hate so much.

    I’m told that if I hate it this much there must be some endearing quality I just haven’t discovered that will make me adore the silly thing.  I might even marry it someday.  We’ll see, I say.