Shouldn't the minimum for a good college web site be an easily searchable schedule of classes, with class descriptions and maybe a little something about the instructor?

How about an updated calendar?

Ways to contact administrators, faculty, Board of Trustees?

Email for students or even some sort of web space for faculty and students, a place to put syllabi or to turn in homework assignments would be a good use of the technology.

Wouldn't it be nice to include art or technology projects? How about an online version of the student newspaper?

The college website would be the perfect place for a degree or transfer requirements.

You'd think if you want to see state-of-the-art web design, www.evc.edu would be the place to go. We are in the middle of Silicon Valley and we have web savvy students and instructors on campus.

You'd be thinking wrong.

Go to any community college website in Iowa and you'll see a better designed, more complete and more often updated site than we have here at EVC.

Our web site is updated about as often as the scrolling ticker in front of the library that has been warning us since last spring that the campus will be closed Memorial Day.

If anybody wants to see how far we lag in the technology department, just try and register for classes online.

While the newly released system shows some promise if it ever works correctly, its clear the current system was installed with minimal testing.

Assuming you can access the new, user unfriendly, WebReg system, you can count on it taking you 10-15 minutes to register for each class.

It does have an express registration option, which does send you off to a broken link quickly.

And whatever you do, don't use your browsers back button.

Silicon Valley residents who might be considering registering at EVC would be inclined to first go to the school's website.

Bad idea.

Clicking on Schedule and Registration button will now take you to the WebReg where you can't do anything until you register.

We can't just let any riffraff find out what classes we are offering!

And if you go ahead and register, the system will assign you a user name. That makes so much sense, all you need is unique user names for every website you visit.

What percentage of students do you think will remember their assigned user-ID from one semester to the next?

Need something unique -- what's wrong with email addresses?

If WebReg was the only problem we could chock it up as a new utility that just needs some bugs worked out.

But the school website has no information a student would ever need. It's no more than a brochure that the Chamber of Commerce might hand out.

The school will say it has been without a web person for almost a year. But that begs the question why wouldn't it use some of the Computer and Information Technology classes to maintain and improve the site?

Why wouldn't the school use art and photography classes to make the site more appealing?

The school sees budget shortfalls and immediately thinks cuts. Efficiency never occurs to them.

Speaking of budget cuts, the counseling office has been especially hard hit. Getting an appointment with a counselor can take weeks.

Want to bet often they are answering the same question, over and over again?

How about a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section to reduce the load on the counselors? Why don't we have a section on the website that tells students what is required to graduate or transfer?

The news isn't all doom and gloom, there is good news.

The EVC website isn't the worst in the area.

Check out www.sjeccd.org, the site for our district office.

How long do you think they'll leave the Sequoia Building dedication up as their breaking news?

If the board's lack of technological vision bothers you, let then know. Send them email or give them a call.

First step might be to figure out which board member represents the district where you live. You can find out from the website, but if you figure it out in less than a half hour you've done much better than we did.

Once you figure that out, then you'll discover there is no contact information for the board on the website.

You can go to a board meeting and complain if only they had a schedule of their meetings published somewhere.

Here's an idea, check past board meeting's minutes and see if there has been talk about technology at past meetings.

Another roadblock, no minutes, past or present.

If there is some Internet way to propose something for future board consideration they've done a good job hiding it.

We're starting to get suspicious they the district office likes working in secrecy.

We could list community college sites that are better than ours, but much easier to go to your favorite search engine and enter "community college."

But we will mention one: www.sjcc.edu.

Yep, San José City College, which has the same budget restrictions we have, somehow manages to have a better web site than EVC.

Our DEan of Technology contacting their Dean of Technology to see how they do it probably makes a bit too much sense for it to happen.