UMBC’s New Homepage & Portal
UMBC is launching a new home page on the Web (www.umbc.edu) and (http://my.umbc.edu). The strategy for the August 2006 launch and future phases is to refocus the UMBC homepage on the needs of external users, while making myUMBC more useful to internal users through richer content and self-service options.
The redesign, a collaborative effort between the Offices of Institutional Advancement (OIA) and Information Technology (OIT), reflects input gathered over the last three years during talks with prospective undergraduate and graduate students, and UMBC students, faculty and staff.
UMBC’s enrollment goals play an important role in the homepage design. In order to attract prospective undergraduate and graduate students, it will be important to use the homepage as a marketing tool, promoting campus life and student success stories, for example. Site users and prospective students said that information on both the old homepage and portal was hard to find and the homepage did not give a sense of the campus or what it is like to attend UMBC.
The new design by Jim Lord ’99, OIA’s associate director of creative services, features an upgraded navigational scheme that highlights audience-specific resources (prospective students, parents, alumni, etc.), a collage of campus photos and more room for events and feature stories. The new homepage and portal will also highlight our 40th anniversary and upcoming capital campaign.
The new myUMBC was designed by UMBC’s new campus portal architect B. Collier Jones in OIT. The redesign changes the look and feel of the campus’ internal site, which provides access to tools and utilities faculty, staff and students need to do their work and live on campus. For now, most of those functions remain the same; the presentation, however, has changed.
For the fall 2006 launch, the new portal is particularly focused on the needs of students and will be a one-stop shop for news about what’s happening on campus. The Start Page features announcements, information about upcoming events and news of interest to undergraduate and graduate students, such as student government, information about registration and commencement, residential life, arts and athletics.
In the next year, faculty and staff will have their own Start Pages, but the new portal currently features a front-page “dashboard” with access to most popular applications for faculty, staff and students – blackboard, e-mail and Oracle Calendar (for faculty and staff).
This facelift is just the beginning of plans to improve UMBC’s Internet presence. The OIA and OIT Web team, collectively known as “Emedia,” calls it “a down payment” on the future sites. In addition to Jones and Lord, the team includes John Fritz, director of instructional technology and new media and Jackie Ward, campus Web architect from OIT and Eleanor Lewis, associate director of internal and digital communications from OIA.
Read more about the new features on UMBC’s homepage and portal and next steps for a site-wide redesign.
Please send your comments and suggestions on the new homepage and myUMBC to helpdesk@umbc.edu.
UMBC is an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Institution
