SG officers update Web site infrequently

Parts of the AU Student Government Web site, AUSG.org, have not been consistently updated because of issues with the site, according to SG President Andy MacCracken and Secretary Colin Meiselman.

Each executive and SG organization, such as the Kennedy Political Union, update their sections of the site, and some pages have not been updated for months.

SG is working to make the site more user-friendly for students and SG members, Meiselman said.

While the homepage is regularly updated with a slideshow of SG events, there was only one update on the executive pages in November. Meiselman — who is in charge of updating the site — posted the update Nov. 14 about an upcoming Student Health Center town hall. The previous update was a month earlier, Oct. 14, by MacCracken. Vice President Alex Prescott and neither of SG’s 2009-2010 comptrollers, Matt Handverger and Alan Chang, have ever posted on the Web site. MacCracken has updated his page most often, about once a month.

No attendance or legislation records for the Fifth Undergraduate Senate, which began in October, have been posted. The Judiciary’s Web site includes applications for the Judicial Board, fall election results and pros and cons of a referendum that was going to appear on the fall ballot, not student-elected, positions.

The SG Facebook and Twitter pages, on the other hand, were last updated Nov. 10, advertising the Student Veterans Reception.

The social networking pages are not replacing AUSG.org, Meiselman said in an e-mail.

“We are in a transition at the moment and we’ve found that we are able to get a lot of information across via Facebook and Twitter,” he said.

Toward the end of the fall semester and the beginning of the spring semester, an improved site will “go hand in hand” with an SG marketing campaign, Meiselman said.

“Because of the issues we currently have with the site, we’ve been using different forms of communication on the Internet to reach the student body,” Meiselman said.

MacCracken said he personally had difficulty updating his part of the Web site because of the new layout and organization of the site. The executives have had several meetings about the site and how to mesh the previous Web site with the current site, he said.

They want the site to be “as user-friendly as possible for new people coming to the site and a resource for Student Government people to utilize and update,” MacCracken said.

Other areas of the site have gone unused by executives and students as well. All four of the topics on SG’s new “Active Forum” were posted in August by SG IT Director Jake Paul or Meiselman. The forum is an online conversation board where SG members post topics so the AU community can respond. In one topic, Meiselman asks, “What do you want to see from your Student Government?”

One responder replied on Oct. 1 saying “the whole site is out of date” and requested that students be able to track the progress of a bill in the Undergraduate Senate and be able “to find AUSG’s accomplishments, goals, and current projects.”

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