After hopes of getting a revamped myWSU up and running by the end of 2023, Wichita State students, faculty and staff will see a new — but temporary — website this month.
Due to the website’s current platform expiring soon, Wichita State’s Information Technology Services (ITS) created an interim website that will launch on Aug. 5.
“We were forced to do something because we didn’t have our long-term solution in place,” said Ken Harmon, chief information officer at ITS.
myWSU has housed Wichita State technology and information since 2006, according to the internet archive website Wayback Machine.
With the change, myWSU will appear largely the same but will include a more mobile-friendly interface and an appearance more akin to Wichita State’s wichita.edu.
“If you think about (myWSU) today, it almost looks like there’s three columns on every page,” Harmon said. “And so when you want to use it on your phone, you have to shrink or zoom in. And it’s still the same page; you just have to kind of work your way around it.”
Harmon said the new website will collapse based on the size of the screen.
“Instead of three columns, it moves everything to just one column, and it automatically says, ‘OK, let’s put the more important stuff to the top,’ so you don’t have to scroll through everything on that page,” Harmon said.
While the interim website has a few improvements, Harmon said he and ITS didn’t want to spend a lot of time making it perfect.
“That’s a homegrown system, so that’s something we had to develop, and we don’t want to have to support that forever,” Harmon said.
It might be a while before users see that long-term solution, though.
Back when ITS was working on finding a new vendor for myWSU in April 2023, Harmon said he and the department thought they had found an option that they wanted to pursue.
“In the end, we decided that it was not going to work for us, so that’s been the delay,” Harmon said. “We’re basically going back to the market and looking at other alternatives.”
And while the university’s web development team built this temporary myWSU platform, Harmon said it’s more cost-efficient to outsource the potential website.“(The market has) multiple customers that … are testing it and using it and getting all the bugs out and all the kinks out,” Harmon said. “Whereas if we built it, we’re just the only ones (testing it).”
While a specific timeline is difficult to confirm, Harmon said he hopes that the university has “locked in on what we want to do” in a couple of months.
With the interim portal, students, faculty and staff can expect to see several changes, including:
- A more mobile-friendly design
- An interface that matches the rest of wichita.edu
- Less cluttered pages, reducing the link farm
- A new “Application for Degree” administration tab
With these changes, a few aspects of myWSU will move or end:
- Financial adviser channel information will be moved to another area
- Student work-study balance channel will not make it to the updated portal
