The IT department used artificial intelligence to make changes to 95 pages in this first phase of the project, which was completed.
The first phase of the project took about three months and was finalized mid September. The refresh included collaboration between the IT department, faculty and students and its objectives were to better showcase what GC has to offer and make the website more interactive for online visitors.“We wanted to make sure that the voice that was being portrayed in each page for different departments was unique,” said Isabel Massud ’26, a part of the project’s team.
AI played a crucial role in refreshing the website by saving a lot of time, because the staff did not have to do a lot of manual work. The operating team worked closely with faculty members to gather the right information and organize and update it with the help of Claude, an AI chatbot.
“When the AI agents would be making the pages, because they are the ones who did the heavy lifting on the pages, we would just implement what information we would want them to portray,” Massud said.
One of the biggest improvements came to the website’s search bar. Before the refresh was made, the search function would give different unorganized results than what the visitor was looking for.
The updated search bar is designed to make it easier for people to find the information needed. “When we showcased the new search bar to the faculty everybody clapped. It was about 30 seconds of clapping, they were so happy,” said Silas Immanuel, this project’s leader.
The majors and minors pages were refreshed, adding more photos and shorter descriptions. This change wants to engage more students and make it easier for prospective students to find out if GC is the right fit for them.
“We wanted to create pages that felt personal while also answering the questions that students actually ask,” said Ziwe Ncube, a business senior major who was part of the project.
As the team was mainly students or recent graduates, the project provided an opportunity to see how AI can be used positively and in a real-world matter.
“Our team, in the summer, applied AI really carefully and really smartly, and because of that my experience with AI was really good because it helped me do my job easier and faster,” said Massud. “It was just like a crutch that I could use the same way a lot of other fields have their own crutches.”
Although the first phase was recently completed, the work is not done.
The second phase will build on the changes already made as the IT department continues to improve the website and how students interact with it.
“With phase two, we are going and tackling the rest of the site and we are trying to figure out what else can be fixed because we want to refresh everything,” Immanuel said.
Some of the bigger parts in phase two will be a page for students who want to transfer to GC and the international students page. “We already have the initial pages down, so we are trying to see what we can do to make these pages just pop a little more and be more friendly,” said Immanuel.
The web refresh project demonstrates how AI can be used in a constructive way, especially with how many students were involved in the process. The summer refresh of the website still goes on with phase two in order to make a better experience for prospective students and the GC community.
