The beginning of second semester marked the first set of major changes being made to the Black Hills State University website which is bhsu.edu. These changes have varied, the most noticeable being the visual changes regarding the homepage and subpage menus.

On the BHSU homepage, many of the button links, like the main link for web advisor and d2l have disappeared, being replaced by a single drop down menu, and search bar. Ryan Shippy, coordinator of web development at BHSU, explained,

“Websites are constantly changing in little ways, but we had reached a point where we felt an overall update to the site was needed. The main focus of the changes was to revamp the navigation of the website and give the homepage a new look. Both of those changes have been made, but there are still a few small tweaks we need to address.”

The Student Technology Fellows (STFs) at BHSU have been working since the beginning of the semester; going through each page on the site. They’ve added menu buttons to the right side — replacing the bulky menu that had previously taken up the entire left side of the page. This cleans up the look of the website and has ultimately made navigation easier as well.

Many users, students and faculty alike, have noticed the changes. Many question why all the changes were necessary in the first place.

Shippy clarified, “The biggest change over the past few years has been the rise of mobile users. Nearly 40 percent of the users are visiting the BHSU website on their mobile device. To help these users and desktop users as well, we wanted to simplify the navigation.”

“Rather than trying to put all possible links in a large menu, we decided to focus on just delivering the menu options they are most likely to use when they are in a particular area of the website. This simplification we then applied to the home page as well by cleaning up the amount of links and information,” Shippy said.

Most of the major changes have already been made- the ones that users will notice. Shippy and the STFs are still working to clean up and reorganize all the information on the website. The infrastructure of the site is also under construction but Shippy confirmed that most of those changes will not affect the majority of users. Websites are constantly changing, so the updates are never truly finished.