UMB has been renovating, rebuilding, and remodeling the outer appearance of the campus. This idea of revamping and improvement has been applied to the university web presence as well.
Director of Communications Dewayne Lehman and the Government Relations and Public Affairs Department began working on the new site back in the fall of 2009.
Mr. Lehman explained in an interview how work began.
“Through several meeting with students and Faculty we learned that we needed to create a site that was more intuitive and made things easier to find. We took out a lot of the insider language, for example a fresh graduate may not know that philosophy is in the Liberal Arts College.”
Malcolm Asomugha, a freshman who has just begun working toward his business management degree, described the site as being “simple and clear. E-mail, Wiser, all the important stuff is right at the top of the page; finding classes was easy.”
Ma Malin Jonsson who has an undeclared major also had a positive experience in dealing with the new site. She explained, “It is basic and quick all the important things are easy to find. I went to the sports activities page, which was cool. It provides a really nice overview of the campus.”
According to Lehman, the old website was too large. A page would be created for a class or program. That class or program would cease to exist but the page wouldn’t. By the time of its death, the old site had grown to almost 40,000 pages.
The new site currently has 7,500 pages and it is expected to grow, but within limits. Lehman explained, “The new site has a content management system that allows for web editors who work in every department on campus to keep the site updated and fresh and free of useless pages.”
Lauren Brakett, administrative assistant to the English department, spends about three hours a week updating the site and managing the content on the department’s pages. She explained how the new site makes her job easier.
“The old site was really faulty. It was difficult to transfer word documents, but the real problem was that you could edit pages but you could not see your work on the live site. You would have to make your changes upload them, wait a day, see what it looked like on the actual user site, and then try to correct it if it didn’t look right. Now I can edit and see my work on the live site as I edit. It makes things a lot easier.”
The new site is not universally popular. Alyssa Kelly, junior sociology and physiology major, said she had issues using it.
“It’s over the top for no reason. For instance, if I search the site for the bookstore it takes me to a page about the bookstore and then I have to find the link on that page that actually takes me to the bookstore. I might as well have used Google.”
Jenifer Celino, staff administrative coordinator for the Student Activities Office, described the difficulties she has been having with the new site. “For the last year I helped with the student activities pages. The new site is very visually appealing. I think it’s on the right track but it needs some work. I have been having trouble getting to necessary financial applications quickly, probably for security reasons. I think there are some bugs that still need to be worked out.”
The new site came together in three phases. First it was determined that the priority of the new site would be ease of use for new students.
In phase two, web designers built the architecture to support this priority.
In phase three, Viridian Spark, a web design company that specializes in university sites, followed UMB blueprints and created the basic website.
In May 2011, Viridian Spark sent UMB a 60-page site. Since then, professionals in all departments that have web design or web editing experience have been expanding the site and updating it as necessary.
Daily web traffic varies. The first day of school last September was in the range of 60,000 hits, and in the last academic year, umb.edu had around 5 million hits.
According to Lehman, the university spent approximately $425,000 on the development of the new website. The funding was appropriated in the fiscal year 2010 and 2011 budgets.
