July 12, 2006
Preview Our New Internet Sites
In August, UMBC will launch a new home page on our Web site and a new myUMBC portal. Please take a look at both and let us know what you think. (Note: These are mock-ups and not all features work.)
Posted by jward at 1:16 PM | Comments (1)
April 10, 2006
Collier Jones Joins OIT as Portal Architect
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.
Posted by jward at 1:46 PM
November 16, 2005
Web Redesign Idea Incorporates myUMBC
With the launch of myUMBC-beta, UMBC has taken the first step in the process of rethinking and redesigning the university’s Web presence.
Beginning in Spring ’05, the web development group will begin to examine the best way to redesign www.umbc.edu. In addition to a new look and feel for the site, we’re also exploring the best ways to present information to internal (faculty, staff and students) and external (potential students, media, everyone else) audiences.
The new uPortal platform for myUMBC gives us an opportunity to divide and focus the content of our site. Our plan is to make myUMBC more useful but integrating many of the functions people need to do their jobs—the phone book, news and announcements– into the portal (myUMBC).
That would allow the “external” site—www.umbc.edu, to be the public face of the university containing information the rest of the world needs about our university: sports schedules, events and programs.
The portal and website are tools. Our goal is to make these tools more robust to better serve you. Take a minute to post a comment and let us know what you think of the plan.
Posted by jward at 8:56 AM | Comments (5)
September 8, 2005
Stepping Back and Looking Forward
Okay, we heard you, and here are ways you said the new UMBC homepage and website could be improved:
* Launch both together;
* Improve design to reflect UMBC's energy and quality;
* Use more campus photos, similar to the new About UMBC;
* Make myUMBC a more prominent homepage link;
* Consider vertical scrolling layout;
* Study peers and competitors;
* Tighten programming to adhere to contemporary web standards.
So, we’re stepping back and will launch a new UMBC web presence in Summer 2006—homepage and all. We’ve turned off comments to the original "sneak peak" post, but if you’d like to learn what we plan to do (and offer new comments) use the form below. Future updates will appear on this blog and be linked to “About This Site” on the current homepage.
To prepare for the entire site redesign, a collaborative web team known as “Emedia” (consisting of staff from the Offices of Institutional Advancement and Information Technology) will reflect on comments about the new homepage “sneak peek,” including follow up emails to those who offered comments (and are willing to talk to us some more).
We had also planned to do the following, but will announce and report on them in this blog during the 2005-06 academic year:
* Re-convene a campus web advisory group consisting of students, faculty, staff, alumni and other campus stakeholders;
* Share results of needs analysis interviews with selected campus groups from 2004-2005 as well as future web usability interviews;
* Conduct peer and competitor site benchmarking studies, similar to those done for the 1998 and 2000 homepage redesigns (more info);
* Conduct search engine and site traffic analyses to see what users are searching for and the sites they frequent the most;
* Develop an accessible and standards-compliant web site.
In retrospect, a lot has changed since UMBC launched an entirely new site in 1998. Our site is bigger, our users are more web savvy and web technologies have grown in complexity and are still maturing. As a result, our process for redesigning UMBC’s web presence needs to change as well. While we have listened to feedback in the past, we need to listen some more and then do our best to provide a site that meets the original goals for the site:
* Focus on information needs of all users;
* Improve ease of use and navigation;
* Improve and maintain a consistent UMBC identity throughout the site.
Okay, let us know what you think, and if you’d like to participate in the various user research activities described above. You can use the comment form below or send email to webteam@umbc.edu.
Posted by fritz at 7:40 PM | Comments (2)
August 30, 2005
UMBC Launches "Sneak Peek" of New Homepage
Today, UMBC is providing a "sneak peek" of its new homepage, which begins the process of redesigning UMBC's entire web presence by summer 2006. If you'd like to comment on the new homepage or the process for developing the site to follow, use the comment form below.
Posted by fritz at 11:33 AM | Comments (27)