THE Volume 94, Issue 1
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UADRANGLE A Student Publication of Manhattan College Since 1924
August 30, 2016
College Launches New Website, with Mobile Users in Mind
Manhattan College/Courtesy
Stephen Zubrycky Editor
Manhattan College launched itself headlong into the 21st Century last week with the launch of a full overhauled website, with a special focus on mobile devices. The new site, which launched last week, features a fresh new look – brought to life with lush photography and videography, borrowing visual motifs first debuted in marketing materials last year as part of the College’s “Uncommon” admissions campaign. This new iteration of the site has been designed to be more mobile-friendly than iterations past. “Mobile is huge. And it’s really a big shift from how we designed our websites previously. It was that you designed it for a desktop monitor and then you thought about mobile later. Well that’s flipped now,” said Jake Holmquist, the chief information officer of the Information Technology Services (I.T.S.) Department. Some of that art on the new site may look familiar. Annie Chambliss, director of web communications for the college, estimates that roughly half of the art on the new site has been carried over from old photoshoots. One of the bigger tasks undertaken by the Marketing and Communication De-
partment, of which Chambliss is part, was updating the summaries on the website. “Some stuff was picked up fairly directly, but most of the stuff was rewritten,” Chambliss said. Most of these revisions involved shortening lists, and streamlining prose in order to shorten paragraphs. “People don’t really read on the Internet, so we made an effort to condense the content we had on the old site,” Chambliss said. For the Department, editing and posting content to the site should be made much easier using the College’s new content management system, Cascade CMS. Cascade is the flagship product of Hannon Hill Corporation, which is based out of Atlanta. For the service, the College will incur an annual fee, but both the Marketing and Communication I.T.S. Departments argue that the college will ultimately break even by lowering the indirect costs associated with the college’s old open-source CMS, Drupal. But while the out-facing skin of the website was designed to attract new students, the meat-and-potatoes of it was designed with faculty and current students in mind. The new Inside Manhattan page increases ease and accessibility for current students and faculty, and is just a single click away from the home page. The page replaces the MyMC portal, and features a quick links search which
navigates to different applications, from commonly used ones like email and Moodle to lesser-used functions like provost forms and parking tickets. The portal is visible to everyone – even those without a Manhattan login. Many of these features will also be available in the forthcoming student-designed application, which will be available on the Apple App Store this fall. BarkleyREI is not affiliated with the project. The cost of the site was shouldered evenly by the I.T.S. and Marketing and Communication Departments. Both departments however refused to give the Quadrangle a dollar estimate as to the total cost of the new site. BarkleyREI, a digital services firm based out of Pittsburgh was contracted in the spring of 2015 by the College to design the site after a competitive bidding process. BarkleyREI is a subsidiary of the advertising and marketing firm Barkley, which is based in Kansas City, Missouri. As such, BarkleyREI designed the website primarily as a marketing tool for the College. The firm has carved out a national niche for itself among not-for-profit organizations, especially among institutions Continued on page 3
www.mcquad.org
Summer Scholars Reflect on Projects Tara Marin Asst. Editor
Every summer at Manhattan College a handful of students conduct research projects of their choice, with the assistance of a professor within their department. Of the multiple programs that MC offers, The Lasallian Research Scholars allows students to apply for a stipend to pursue a project within a specific area of Lasallian ideas. One of these scholars was Angela Benevenia, a senior sociology and English major. Her research was on Junot Díaz’s 2007 novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”. “It is the story of Oscar de León, a second-generation Dominican American who lacks machismo and does not fit the stereotype of a Dominican player; therefore, he turns to sci-fiction/fantasy novels and films because he identifies with the marginalized characters. He is not only marginalized in America for being Latino, but does not fit in with his other Dominican family because of his looks and lack of machismo; however, he is not white, so he does not fit into the sci-fi/fantasy culture,” Benevenia explained. This unique research required a significant amount of reading and also watching films, so Benevenia could gain greater insight. “I read many sci-fi/fantasy books and watched multiple films that Oscar did in order to try and understand why he liked them so much. I argued that in these books - mainly J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy - and films - mainly ‘Star Wars’ there exists a deep misogyny equivalent to the misogyny our narrator expresses about Dominican culture: Oscar rejected one kind of misogyny for another in his sci-fi/fantasy obsession; these works’ obsession with heroism and saving the ‘damsel in distress’ are what lead to Oscar’s untimely death,” she said. Benevenia worked with Adam Koehler, Ph.D., associate professor of the English department, who provided her with texts that helped enhance her argument, as well as mentorship for her throughout the project. Her method of presenting her research makes the project even more thought-provoking. “I conducted my research by re-reading the main text, then reading and watching the secondary works, then analyzing it in my Digital Essay, a project that uses Prezi, a digital presentation tool, and pictures, poems, videos, songs, etc. to convey my argument,” she said. Benevenia’s love for Díaz’s work and her own aspirations to be a writer are what led her to choosing this research project. “‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’ is my favorite novel, and Junot Díaz is a huge influence of mine. I want to be an author myself, and I aspire to write as well as him. His works focus on race and gender tensions, and are majorly influenced by female writers of color. This project was important to me because I was tired of hearing critics of Díaz’s work claim that he Continued on page 6