TuftsLife.com administrators plan on improving the Web site's coverage of the daily menus of Carmichael and Dewick-MacPhie Dining Halls soon, although they declined to give a specific time frame.
The campus-life Web site currently updates Carmichael's menu every day, but postings of Dewick's menu have been inconsistent. The reason for this, according to the students who administer TuftsLife, is that they have had difficulty communicating with Dining Services.
"[Dining administrators] e-mail us their menus every so often and then we put it into the Web site. But sometimes they don't decide the menus until the day of ... and unless they plan them all in advance then they don't send them to us," said senior Adam White, a Tuftslife administrator.
The lack of online menus is a serious problem, according to freshman Joel Greenberg, who also works for TuftsLife.
"[S]tudents need the menus online. They need to choose where they can eat, if say they have an allergy, if they're vegetarian, for religious adherence maybe. And students should also be able to just know what they're going to be eating that day. They should be able to answer the question, 'What's for dinner?'" he said.
White said that TuftsLife, which underwent a makeover this summer, will be improving in other areas shortly. "Hopefully within the next couple of months there'll be some really cool features that'll come up," he said.
"The site is continually evolving. There's a lot of stuff we want to do in the future," Greenberg said.
According to White, TuftsLife chose to renovate due to the large number of suggestions it received last year. "[Last year] we had a lot of ideas being sent to us about a new site," he said. "We had a big list of things we wanted to change. And the old site was about six or seven years old. So we decided we would release a new site."
The group began the overhaul by incorporating the suggested changes. "The new design is what's enabling the new features," White said. "And these changes [would have been] impossible with the old site. It was really fragile and would break down. The new site's built with very good coding so we can start adding the new features soon. And our new system makes the menu formatting happen a lot faster so the turnaround's a lot quicker and easier."
He underlined the importance of enhancing the revamped site, especially in light of negative student feedback the administrators have received since releasing the new version of TuftsLife this summer. "We'd been getting a lot of e-mails saying that it was sad that we'd sacrificed function to make it look pretty. But the funny thing was we were trying to make the function better," White said. "This was the only form that we could use to get it up in time."
The overhaul happened over the summer so that the Web site could be up during the year, according to White. "We knew we had to have it up sometime in August ... so two of us built the whole thing in the last few weeks of summer. It was a pretty big undertaking, so we borrowed an old design that an alum made from two years ago that we hadn't been able to implement yet," he said.
