UMBC Webteam

hate it, i think the old version is easy to navigate and everyone is used to it. As for new students, the old website is quite easy to understand, they wont have a problem...

The "My Academic Profile" section, specifically the "course history" sorting and "undergraduate progress report" functionality is awesome! The new functionality is helpful (and way past due!), but I don't find the new organization helpful. Password changing and email filtering does not need to be on the main page. And financial info should have it's own tab/link from the main page, not to be under "services!" Maybe a new survey should be sent out to discover what links/tabs/functions students use the most and should see on the main page. Ideally, the it should be dynamic, so the user could change the main links/tabs to his/her own preference.

I have a concern that may be quite unfounded, but I'll voice it. Recently, I have had a series of frustrating interactions with OTHER university's websites. I was trying to find email addresses and phone numbers for colleagues at various places. In quite a few instances that information was absolutely illusive (at least to me) from the university website. No amount of following links or creative "googling" on the website could provide me with the contact information. When I just read your description of "internal" and "external" that raised a flag that we too will have an inpenatrable "facade" website to the external world.

The thing that my frustrating sites all seemed to have in common was what appeared to me to be assumptions about why people went to the site. That and they seemed a marketing tool to the exclusion of being a navigatable source of information about the school. They were all broken down into "For students" "For faculty and staff" "For parents" but they were quite unfriendly to anyone just trying to get information about the place but wasn't looking to read PR article or news of the football (or chess) team.

Along those lines, and this is my final thing . . . many of these sites had this MOST absurd thing in common. It took a ridiculously long time to find a list of departments! And if I would type the name of the department into the search engine, it gave me a list of stories about the department rather than the link to the department's webpage. I felt like a was wading through a commercial to get to real INFORMATION.

OK, this is just my rant. These comments are made in good faith and spirit. I have nothing but admiration for OIT and the job you all do. My request is that everything is done to keep our website friendly to outsiders who we are not trying to recruit.

Regards!

I think that the new look is very functional and aesthetically pleasing. It reminds me of Blackboard, which is good for when one has to transfer back and forth from Blackboard and myumbc, new students will be able to use both more comfortably together.

I looked at the new design and instantly hated it... then i decided to give it a chance. Now, my disgust has factual backing.

I'm gonna start with the easy stuff. The new design looks like crap. it is not appealing to the eye, theres a lot of wasted whitespace, and there is no feeling of an overall layout or grid. it looks like they just took different sized blocks of info and threw them on there, picked 3 colors at random and applied them. there is no form or flow to the new design whatsoever. And its just plain ugly.

moving on to my second point. The old website had a very straightforward, organized and categorized, and simple layout. links were categorized and easy to get to as you could, for the most part, get to anything you needed from one nice little page where all the links are simply listed. imagine that! ease of use, why the heck would anyone need that? the old design MADE SENSE. it was straight-up 'this is here, this is here', no nonsense or clicking 8 links to get to the subcategory you need. and god forbid we keep a main page with often used links on it instead of obscure ones. jeeze.

Next topic. The old site's links WORKED!!! the new sites links.... don't. most of them either send you to the wrong page or nowhere at all (case in point: the beta version link at the top of THIS PAGE). god forbid we put functionality, ease of use, and practicality above the whim of whoever decided we should go with a new layout for god knows what reason, because the reasons they're giving us for wanting a new layout are clearly not being fulfilled.

Moving on...
The new version is insanely buggy. it would be bad enough as they apparently wanted it to turn out without all the bugs that come from careless, sloppy, and rushed implementation. try this one. go into your email (notice that email is still the old style - failure to uniformly update the system) and click on oh.. any tab at the top... 'academics' 'personal' etc... and it takes you back to the main page!(failure to smoothly integrate modifications to the system)... from which point you have to click on the tab again (except this time you have to stare at the horrible color scheme while you're doing it). There has been a horrible failure to do anything other than uglify and disorganize a few of the pages on my umbc.

in closing, maybe the new layout has potential, maybe it could be better and easier to navigate.
maybe next time i open a soda a geenie will pop out. life's full of maybe's. most that are like the 3 i just listed never happen.

my turn to give you a 'D' on something UMBC. horrible job. try harder next time, instead of throwing what looks like a freshman's rough draft of a project for an HTML class at us.

--steve