If you’ve thought our school website could use an upgrade, you’re not alone. Luckily, seniors Margaret Patterson and Fiona Fitzsimons are here to save the day with their new organization: the website club. 

Created over the summer, the club’s goal is to make the school website more user-friendly. “We wanted to make it more functional,” explained Patterson. “The old website was poorly designed.”

The last time wilsonhs.org had a visual upgrade is a mystery, and while the school has made a significant effort to erase Woodrow Wilson’s name from the property, the current website’s URL has yet to be changed.

The club updates the website by “taking the information over to a WordPress site and reorganizing it,” explains Fitzsimons. “After that, we’re going to work to make it more user friendly and fix the homepage…we’re also going to update the URL.” 

The group meets weekly to add updates to the new site.

The club hopes to become a gateway for students to get more involved with computer science and tech. Although the club is currently only composed of seniors, the leadership hopes that students of all ranges of experience with coding join. 

“One of the goals of the website club is to train people who don’t know anything, so that next year we can roll it over to a new group of students who will get more involved,” explains advisor Elizabeth Mettler, who helps Patterson and Fitzsimons with redesigning the website. 

The process has not been without issues. Approval for the redesign was given much later than the group had hoped for, delaying the entire operation. The intensive process has put recruitment on the backburner. 

“We’re going to do heavy recruiting [in the future] so that after we graduate students can still be involved,” added Patterson. “We’ve been talking to the leadership of Girls Who Code and we’re going to do the classics: put up posters, get on the announcements, and have an article written about us!”

If you’re interested in joining the club, reach out to patters.margaret@gmail.com for more information.

Although it’s unclear when the website will be fully completed, the website club is hard at work transferring data over and making the new website accessible and appeasing to the eye. When asked about whether they’re going to help the school with other tech-related issues, Fitzsimons laughed.

“This school has too many tech issues for us to fix them all.” •