Digital Services held its open staff meeting yesterday at Koelbel. There were ten non-Digital Services staaff at this meeting, wow, what a great turn-out! Great conversations ensued about everything on the agenda. Today's blog captures those comments, input, suggestions in regards to the new website design of which the photo is posted again today. In no particular order, here are the suggestions. Feel free to post your feedback to each item, or to any one particular item that hits your hot button!
*"more" - we currently use "more" to carry the rest of our story on another page. It's set by number of characters and the "more" is automatically inserted. It sometimes falls in awkward places. Can the "more" at least be placed at the end of a sentence? was asked.
*patrons creating online book lists. Mr Smith wants to share his 5 favorite golf books; can the website accomodate it? How does CDA support this/not?
*site map - see yesterday's post
*Russian and Spanish links. Right now they are at the bottom of the home page. Is this good enough positioning? Why or why not?
*the ALD Live logo just looks like a logo and not something click-able. Can the rollover say something else like "live book reviews" or can it be a box that says something within it?
*the Find box has a number of options to choose from. They are all in lowercase letters. The first word should be upper case. Related comment - the first option in the find box is "items in the online catalog." Suggestion to bold the words "online catalog" for greater prominence.
*On the interior pages, there is no "table of contents" which tells you what is on the page (eliminated to accomodate the "related info" box). How do we know what's there and why should we scroll down if we don't?
*the putty colored boxes on the right have white text within them. one staff person said it was fairly unreadable.....
Long enuf post for today.
1 comment:
Just proving that I wasn’t crazy… I knew I had commented about that before, but it’s a good topic to bring up again. I might add that if Library School taught me anything it’s that different people have different learning styles – so I feel we owe it to our patrons (or web site users, in this case) to give them different options for access so that they can find what they are looking for. The site map/index is one method of access that some, but obviously not all, patrons use.
Slightly off subject, but still relating to access, the discussion at the DS meeting the other day briefly touched on the search box on the new website format – I think capitalizing or not capitalizing “By” for a catalog search was the discussion. My question isn’t on grammar/spelling but on the catalog search process. The default for most searches is “author” however that actually includes non-book “creators” including in many cases actors, directors, recording artists, musical groups, composers, conductors, & narrators (of audio books). Is it possible to investigate creating media specific search pages with information related to that media type? For instance, on a music page have a search box that explains that patrons can look for singers, conductors, composers & musical groups via that “author” search box. The same thing could be done on the movie page for searching for directors, actors, etc. Perhaps similar “help” could be provided for other areas of catalog searching – “series” searches come quickly to mind. If this concept doesn’t make sense, let me know and perhaps I can clarify – the Skokie Public Library site that I referred to a while ago has a similar concept on its catalog homepage (http://catalog.skokielibrary.info/search). I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to look at their site, but I really like the layout they use. They use a dropdown style menu on the left side of the homepage that gives detail to the categories provided. It’s clean & well designed.
email from andrew, posted to the blog with his permission
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