The UH-Clear Lake Web site will soon be redesigned using Web portal technology.

As it is, the university Web site is very hard to navigate and offers little information unless you know exactly where to find it. Because the site is so large, it is difficult to go from one page to another.

The site also makes it hard to find specific data because there is no place to enter search topics. The Web site only offers a pull-down menu, which is little help unless you know which page to look on.

Recently, I was trying to find the average age of UH-Clear Lake students - a fact that I was told was on the UH-Clear Lake Web site. After searching through countless pages I found nothing.

So I asked staff members on campus for help, but even they couldn't navigate the unfriendly pages.

I eventually went to someone in the Office of Institutional Effectiveness who led me through the long and winding Web path to the facts I was looking for. A process that should have taken only a few minutes actually took all morning and sent me to three university offices.

To fix this problem, University Computing and Telecommunications is using portal technology to make the Web site more user-friendly. A Web portal is a Web site that offers many different services, including e-mail, search engines, forums and online shopping.

With this Web portal, users will be able to customize the information they receive, without having to search through Web pages that aren't relevant to their search.

Hopefully, this new change will make the UH-Clear Lake Web site more inviting. After all, the Web site is usually the first thing that perspective students see. It should be as accommodating as possible.

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