IMAGINE enrolling from the comforts of your own home. You would be spared of the paper chase and the hassle of lining up.
But with UST’s plans to improve and maximize the use of its website, Thomasians may soon enjoy a hassle-free enrollment online.
According to Jun Dolor, webmaster of Tomasino Web, “the online Thomasian community,” among the long-term plans for the University website is making enrollment and the payment of tuition accessible through the Internet.
Rey Mendoza, web consultant of the Santo Tomas E-Service Providers (Steps), said that the ideal plan is to make transactions web-ready.
“In the long run, we would like to make online enrollment available at the UST website without students having to type in another URL,” he said.
Dolor said he plans to increase the functionality of the website by making it up-to-date with web development trends.
In addition, UST is considering moving the website’s host from Microsoft Windows to the Linux platform, Dolor added.
Linux, a popular version of the Unix operating system, is a multi-tasking, multi-user operating system that is known for its stability. It has increasingly become the operating system for supercomputers.
“Moving the website to the Linux platform would make the website perform better and would enable online enrollment to become more efficient,” Dolor said.
The plans will be implemented after a web development team has been formed “so that the development of the UST website will be well planned and well structured,” Dolor explained.
The team will be composed of a webmaster to oversee the development, the senior and junior web programmers to do website coding, and senior and junior content developers to update web pages.
Dolor said that over the short term, he would improve of the appearance of the website.
Improvements have already begun, with the addition of new features such as the banner with announcements.
“Since it is a school website, it has to bear the identity of the University which is yellow,” Mendoza said. “I also plan to put some tiger icons and make it simpler and easy-to-navigate.”
