Out with the old:

Since the early 2000s, the WHHS community has been using the same website. For many of those years, it was largely left behind and ignored by many. To circumvent this, the rest of the school found other solutions elsewhere.

“The website we had [before] was done in collaboration with the parent board and the alumni foundation,” Debbie Heldman, Executive Director of the WHHS Alumni Foundation, said. “We paid for that one, even though it seems antiquated, which of course it is.”

Resources were hard to reach and placed in confusing places. In addition, new information was rarely added and was posted to varying locations.

This led to many people, including students, parents, and staff alike, to become frustrated with the website.

“It wasn’t easy to find the information,” Heldman said. “[The previous website] wasn’t easy to update. It didn’t go together.”

In with the new:

However, in early March, the Alumni Foundation revamped the entire site. After five years of development and setbacks, mainly due to the project’s scale, a polished and updated webpage is now live.

Furthermore, if properly maintained, the site will prove to be a reliable source of information for athletics, fine arts, and counseling in addition to school news.

“We’re the largest public high school [in CPS] and we have more opportunities than the other high schools; it’s just a lot going on, all the time,” Heldman said. “This was like doing a university’s [page].”

WHHS has over 60 clubs, 90 sports teams and a deep curriculum that includes many student resources. This includes the counseling team, the Student Success Center (SSC) and the College Information Center (CIC).

From now on, the faculty and administration plans to keep the website updated continuously so that each and every part of the WHHS community can have its information accurately published.

“This new [website] is very intuitive, a lot of people can access [it],” Heldman said. “Every department chair or someone in the department can update, counselors can update [it]… and they’ve been trained.”

However, the delay in publishing the website does have another benefit; due to recent innovations in AI technology, the website now has an AI search assistant, “Ask Wally.”

It finds any relevant information to a prompt. “Ask Wally” replaces the unusable interface of the previous search tool. This allows users to skip the time-consuming and frustrating process of searching through an entire site for one small update. 

Moving forward, the goal with the implementation of the website is to allow students, parents, and staff to search with ease while having their questions answered. 

“When you, as a parent or student, are looking for something, you don’t want to [look] for twenty-five minutes,” Heldman said. “You want one, two clicks. That’s it. You want to get there.”