When Baruchians and their families opened Baruch College Campus High School’s website this school year, they were met with something new. Compared to the “Website Under Construction” sign they saw last summer, they were greeted with a fresh look. 

Starting development at the end of last school year, Baruch’s new website is now open with many new features and areas to explore. Although not finished, Liz Grove–the parent coordinator–explains what will be added and the process of creating this new website.

With translations to more than five languages and a brand new home page with various portals to Baruch’s main resources, Grove said she was proud of the new website and hopes students and families will take a look.

“I really hope that students and families start going to our website and using it as a resource on a regular basis because our calendar is up to date on there,” Grove said. “There’s a lot of relevant information about the great events we’re doing.”

The website also shows a lot of what students are doing, according to Grove, with an athletics section that Mike Bremen–the physical education teacher–built from scratch. 

“All the athletics highlight videos are up there now,” she said. “And those were taken using our Veo camera that our PTA purchased for us, that was parent donations, so they can now see those videos.”

The website also features the newly student-led 411 Show, which is the school’s “multimedia weekly variety show that covers news, sports, music, comedy and so much more,” according to their description on the website.

“I’m really excited that all of the 411 Show videos are up on our website, so people can just click on there and watch the video right on our site and they’ll be updated as they come out,” Grove said. “I think in that way, it’s really become a usable resource for our families, and a really great way for families that are interested in our school to see what we’re all about.”

Grove said although she is excited about all the new content, there is still more to be added to the website, with many of the pages still under construction.

“There was definitely room to improve and add new content, [but] I want to give faculty time to develop those sections, because it takes people time to put content together,” said Grove. “Our faculty is doing a million different things, and so we didn’t give people a set deadline. It’s sort of a progression as we roll out the site.”

Grove shares her ambitions of combining with Baruch’s College Office website, which would be “a really lengthy process to integrate,” but would be “important to do so that all of the information about our school is in one place for students and our families,” she said.

The website is expected to have lots more content available after the summer, Grove said, where she and other faculty will have more time to work on more content.

“When we come back to school in the fall, everything will be there,” Grove said. “And certainly it will be added as we go on throughout the rest of the weeks of the school year.”

According to Grove, she said looking at “a lot of public school websites for New York City public schools, specialized schools and Manhattan high schools” gave her inspiration for new content and features to include in Baruch’s new website.

A lot went into creating the website, Grove said “it was a collaborative effort…with a company called Educational Networks,” who “have done a lot of New York City public school websites.”

A whole team was involved in the creation of the website, according to Grove.

“I worked with primarily a project manager from there, and their whole development team to develop the back end,” Grove said. “I coordinated to come up with the design and then many people at our school and faculty contributed to the content for the different sections.”

Although “the people at Educational Networks were really easy to work with and helpful,” Grove said, there were still many challenges in creating the new website.

“Developing a website is very time consuming–it took many, many months. The tweaks and refining to get [the website] exactly the way we wanted…all of that took a lot of iterations and revisions to get it to where it is now,” said Grove.

The goal was to make a more efficient website. She wanted “to maximize the user accessibility and make it easy for families and students to find the information they want and also relevant,” she said.

According to Grove, the old website was outdated and difficult to operate.

“We were using this platform called WordPress and we didn’t really have any support system in place. It was very much do it yourself,” Grove said. “So any problems or issues that arose, we had to figure those out on our own.”

With the new website, this issue is resolved because she has a tech support team from Educational Networks.

“Any issue that comes up, all I have to do is make a phone call or send an email,” Grove said. “And anything technical that’s beyond my skill set, they’ll usually fix the same day, and that is worth the money.”

Although the process was challenging, Grove said she liked the end result of the new website.

“I’m really proud of how the design turned out,” Grove said. “In the end, it was great.”