Collier Jones is UMBC's new Campus Portal Architect. He has been tasked with helping to make myUMBC a more engaging way to interact with the university by improving its functionality and usability. In addition to leading UMBC's portal redesign efforts, Collier is helping to lead UMBC's awareness and adoption of Web standards, as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium.
Collier is also part of the collaborative team of staff from the Offices of Information Technology and Institutional Advancement (also known as "Emedia") that is redesigning UMBC's strategic Web presence. Co-chaired by Jack Suess, Vice President for Information Technology, and Lisa Akchin, Associate Vice President for Marketing and Public Relations, Emedia meets monthly and is principally focused on development and maintenance of UMBC's portal and external campus Web site.
Before coming to UMBC, Collier was the User Experience Designer for Virginia Tech's portal, My VT, which was built using the same open source uPortal framework now being used by myUMBC. Collier's work with My VT and uPortal was so well received by the uPortal community that he was asked to join the Portal developers group and is now designing part of the next version of the uPortal.
While at Virginia Tech he held lead web-related roles for several university departments, including the role of university webmaster. He has also consulted for Macromedia on some of their web development tools.
In addition to his behind-the-scenes work with the uPortal development team, Collier speaks twice a year at uPortal community conferences about portal design strategies.
Collier's office is located in the New Media Learning and Development suite, 101 ECS. He can be reached by phone at 410.455.3599, or by e-mail at bcjones@umbc.edu.