This title probably applies to lots of things in life......you've saved enough for a vaca when the hot water heater blows, you think you're going to a Rockies game and the open sunroof causes you to be drenched (for the whole story, write me off-blog :) But today, today, we turn our attention to King County Library System. Located in Washington, I believe, they just redesigned their website. Since it's something we've been discussing lots around here, it was more than interesting to see what they did!
There's lots of things I could go on and on about but I'm curious - oh you faithful readers - of what you think of the site:
- the use of colors (lots!)
- its use of boxes (more boxes!)
- how it portrays its content
- its use of search boxes
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3 comments:
I have some mixed feelings about their website. At first I thought, too much. They have a lot right there in front of you. But as I browsed more, they have it catagorized well, so you can easily see what you aren't looking for and skip right over a lot of it, or if you aren't looking for anything, there is a lot of initial exploring you can do.
I definitely don't like that font in all CAPS. To me it makes the page look generic.
I think the idea is good, but it just looks like it needs work, some tweaking.
The search boxes, I like the options it gives for items in the catalog, but I don't know what any of those other search options are.
The colors...ok...not great. Not horrible.
I guess I haven't explored enough other libraries' websites to make a set opinion.
The Darth Vader background threw me off at first, but after a few clicks I find myself getting used to it. It helps the muted tones of color stand out. So many libraries try to use bright colors on white background. I give them credit for breaking a few rules and trying something new.
My big surprise was looking at the "FIND" area. The King County website used to default to the Aquabrowser search, while offering the option of changing the search to the "Classic" catalog. Now the "Classic" catalog is the default search. The "Items in the Catalog" dropdown menu offers "Items with Catalog Explorer" (which is Aquabrowser) as the 10th option in the menu. Was this because of patrons' feedback regarding Aquabrowser?
OK--Here's some quick responses, n a very random order, hopefully I'll get to come back and look a little deeper.
I love the colors, I find it very easy on the eyes.
I like how they have "reviews and more" available to click on the item level...unless our patrons click randomly on the pretty cover item, there's no pointer for them to our Syndetics info.
I find all caps DIFFICULT TO READ wherever I find them. I would much rather our left and right menu items be in Title Case...our center column headlines too. I think we have enough differentiation happening with text placement and size that we don't need the caps as well.
I like their preloaded searches...click on Browse Music and you can click on Jazz and get a prefab search. We just say, "Here's the Online Catalog...you're on your own."
I also really like their "How To" section below the scroll line on the top page. It's a lot of redundant info to the top of the page, but it is really, really user-friendly language. You don't have to spend any time deciding that asking about your library card is a "using the library" issue.
I also like how clean their "inside" pages look. eg, click on Pages for Parents and there's just an easy to read plain jane list of links. (Though it's definitely lacking the style of the top pages.) I really like that we offer our inside page information two ways--just the link titles in the middle menu bar, then the titles and annotes below for more info, BUT I find the middle menu bars hard to read. Centering the title in the columns makes it hard for my eye to process and scan that information. It's not so bad when it's just a word or two ("Timewasters") but it's problematic when there's a couple lines, esp since the software seems to choose automatically where to break the line for us ("Reviews of Harry Potter and the Deathly / Hallows").
That's off the top of my head, hopefully I'll get to spend more time on this later.
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