Library Web Chic

One thing I’ve learned in the last 6 1/2 years of working on library websites is that you have to take any opportunity you have to clean house when it comes to pages. Too many pages end up orphaned or unused over the lifetime of a site. To deal with this, when you do a site redesign you need to consider and question every web page’s place and purpose in the site. If you do this effectively then you should be able to avoid having pages lost in the redesign shuffle and not have irrelevant pages. Currently I’m in the process of doing this for the UH Libraries site. With nearly 900 pages to look at it is a nightmare. What really makes it bad is the fact that we have pages with the same title but different information and urls present in the site. This is beyond bad from my perspective because in addition to creating usability issues for linking, it also makes it extremely difficult to review pages in an efficient manner. If I can’t tell what a page is how the heck is an ordinary user going to be able to tell?

Another piece of cleaning house is that it enables you to designate pages that need to reworked or rewritten. I’m really looking forward to doing this for some of our pages which are way to long and text intensive. I’m also looking forward to combining pages that have similar information. For example, we have a series of pages for Ask a Librarian rather than a single page. Reworking pages means that you have to think creatively about what really should be on a give page and how you can best layout that information to make it readable and interesting.

Take our existing digital exhibits page which looks like this. The main problem with this page is that it is all text. A second issue is how would anyone know if they actually wanted to visit an exhibit or not since we don’t tell them anything about the exhibit. Also exhibits are visual in nature so we should have something visual to draw people in. Below is a semi-final draft of the reworked page.

This whole process of going through adding, deleting, editing/reworking pages is a HUGE part of site redesign and probably the part I like the most. But it is also the most time consuming to do so make sure you leave plenty of time for this work (I didn’t and I’m suffering now). Also, when reworking pages make sure you do some exploring to get ideas from other sites (library and non-library). This has really helped me in creating some of the reworked pages.