Bruinwalk.com faces massive overhaul
By Michelle Chen
Nov. 28, 2000 9:00 p.m.
By Hemesh Patel
Daily Bruin reporter
Bruinwalk.com made its debut on the Internet last year, but it did not live up to expectations of being a state-of-the-art portal site for UCLA students.
As a result, the original site was taken off the Web, leaving five students to reconstruct the site with a $5,000 budget.
Student Media Online put up Buinwalk.com last year intending to create a site students could use as a homepage.
“The original idea was to make it look like Yahoo!’s Web site but specialized for UCLA,” said Patrick Kerkstra, a former editor in chief of the Daily Bruin who helped with the initial concept of the Web site.
When the site went up last year, it was not as successful as anticipated.
“We built a portal but made a lot of mistakes,” said Student Media Director Arvli Ward.
Now the site mainly features a self-regulated message board, where students can delete and add messages.
“(This feature) seems kind of silly because one person can just control the media,” said Ryan Likes, a third-year English student.
The Web site also has an area where Web surfers can draw and submit pictures. The images will be used to make a quilt-like pattern for upcoming advertisements for the site.
The department expected to put up the new version, with a variety of different features, by next quarter, but the site will not go up at that time.
“We’re using students who can work only part-time,” Ward said.
He said the site will feature an instant messaging system, message boards and e-mail that receives attachments.
The site will feature a floppy or disk space on the Internet reserved for students to store files.
Student Media Online department also aims to create a network where students have access and can build high-quality Web sites and databases where content travels seamlessly, Ward said.
Designers of the Web site are still trying to figure out what content the final version of Bruinwalk.com will contain.
“The old portal used to feature news, now we’ve decided that maybe news isn’t the biggest thing people wanted off the Internet,” Ward said. “No one was using the old site, and no one seemed to be appreciating it.”
Some students said they currently see the potential site as another “my.ucla” and don’t see themselves using it on a regular basis.
“Personally I wouldn’t find any use for it, and I don’t think others would actually use it,” said Gordon Kao, a third-year physics student.
“People can use AOL and ICQ for instant messaging and MyUCLA to check mail,” he added.
Kerkstra said Bruinwalk.com was a contemporary of MyUCLA last year, but it was not intended to be academic.
Some students who saw the site in its current form for the first time were lost and found it confusing.
“What are you supposed to do?” said Steven Araki, a third-year international economics student. “It looks like it was a last-minute effort and put together in an hour.”
Despite advertising daily for two to three weeks last year, many students were not aware that the site existed.
“I have never heard of it before. Maybe better advertising would help draw more people to the site,” Kao said.
Students who are redesigning the Web site are not aware when exactly the revamped version of Bruinwalk.com will go up, according to Ward.
“What we’re trying to do is pretty ambitious,” he said. “We want to help organize the network with this portal.”
