ASPC unveiled its new website Oct. 7, with features including a more extensive and detailed dining hall menu, a new ASPC tab listing staff positions, and the phasing out of unnecessary functions, according to Brad Bain PO ’20, lead developer of the ASPC Software Development Group.
“The ASPC website is a resource curated by the Pomona student government as a way to give students services that they really need, that the school isn’t providing, and to also bridge connections between the student government and the student body,” said Sophie Richards PO ’20, product manager of the ASPC Software Development Group.
The old website, which had been operating for about 10 years, was riddled with bugs and functions that were no longer relevant or, in some cases, unusable. The buy-and-sell function on the website was replaced by the Facebook page “5C For Sale and For Free,” and the housing search was moved to external website portals at the request of Pomona administration.
The site currently includes tabs with dining hall menus, course reviews and planning, an event calendar, and ASPC information. The ASPC budget tab will be unveiled in the future.
“At the end of the day, all of these are resources that Pomona students should have access to, and it wasn’t as easy to access them in the past,” Bain said.
A group of three ASPC Software Developing Team members, who are students at Pomona, arrived on campus at the beginning of the 2018-19 school year to build the website, working one 40-hour week and contributing about eight hours per week until the launch, according to Richards.
Due to errors in the old website’s code, the students decided to build an entirely new website.
“We figured that it would be a great opportunity to not just rebuild the site, but to standardize all of our processes around the site so that in the future with students coming and going, the maintainers of the site can have a little bit of an easier time, and hopefully 10 years in the future, we won’t have to rewrite it again,” Richards said.
ASPC President Alejandro Guerrero PO ’19 said he hoped the website would address concerns of transparency and lack of communication between ASPC and Pomona students.
“[U]ltimately, it’s within our title, the Associated Students of Pomona College,” he said. “It’s not just about the Senate, but it’s about making sure that the website is for the community at large.”
Guerrero added that he wants the website to be “a place where students can go to learn more about various on campus resources, and to be a digital platform for the things that students should be knowledgeable and aware of when it comes to campuses.”
Student Carrie Young SC ’21 commented on the new updates and their use for the community.
“[The new ASPC Website] provides a lot more community platform for all of the 5Cs, where before I thought it was more geared towards Pomona students,” Young said.
Maria Heeter SC ’22 is an economics major from Dover, New Hampshire. She previously served as TSL’s fall 2020 editor-in-chief.