New AMS website – nice, but still out of date

You may have noticed that the AMS website has been overhauled. To match with the new setting-sun logo, http://www.ams.ubc.ca/ is now a blue-and-white marvel of slick website design, courtesy of Calgary company White Matter. Good navigation, executive blogs, event notices, and recent news are featured, and nifty pictures and graphics artfully punctuate the pages.

Too bad the website is still out-of-date, and undetailed . The last minutes of student council that are posted are dated June 27th, more than three months ago. While browsing the executive section, I noticed that the quarterly reports of Spencer Keys and Amina Rai were handily available for download. Too bad those are the AMS presidents from two and three years ago, respectively.

Browsing the various student government services has variable results: the Ombuds office, SAC, and Financial commission sections seem to be complete and up-to-date, while the policy manual, AMS Foundation, Student Council, sections need more expansion: descriptions are curt, contact information not handy, and details sparse. The constituency section has some contact info, but doesn’t even have links to each constituency’s own website.

Looking over on the Student Services side, things are spotty too. AMS tutoring seems not to have witched over to the new template, but AMS minischool looks fine. The new AMS service, “AMS connect” which was to take over all volunteer postings after UBC took over Joblink last year, is still confusing. It seems to function, but is unintuitive and weirdly arranged.

The point of all this is not to slag the AMS’s new communication and marketing efforts. The point is that, even with a whole company in the AMS’s employ, and a fancy layout, the AMS website is still going to be below par if there isn’t somebody (a real human!) who continuously updates and fixes it.