For this week’s topic I chose to look at the Marion Library Service (n.d.) website. The website covers all three libraries for the Marion City Council: Marion Cultural Centre, Cove Civic Centre and Park Holme Library. The library website is actually not its own website, but part of the Marion City Council website. The council’s libraries can be found in the venues and facilities section of the website, found on the navigation bar at the top of the page.
The homepage of the Marion City Council website makes the library pages easy to find. The homepage does not follow the ‘F’ page format, but instead is formatted in a way that would be well suited to mobile devices as it has a header, the contents are broken into different sections, such as a search bar, a larger, more simple navigation menu with images, and a section about community events, followed by the footer. This homepage follows a lot of the recommendations made by the Government of Western Australia (n.d.) for making webpages accessible, most notably in the brightly coloured images used in the secondary navigation section which aid people who have difficulty reading text, and the contrasting colours used in the website design (the majority of headers are green, with blue for the text in the top navigation bar, dark grey for the content text and a white background).
Similarly, the library page on the website contains more of those simple navigation images for catalogue searching, library membership, events and library locations. The library page is set out in an ‘F’ shape with a navigation bar at the top, a menu down the left-hand side, and content in the centre of the page. It also has a bread crumb trail at the top of every page, so users know where they are while they’re browsing.
The menu bar running down the left side of the page is unfortunately cluttered and confusing. This menu has all the links for all of the pages for venues and facilities – sixteen different links – with the library page’s secondary links in the middle of this menu. This makes navigating with that menu particularly confusing for anyone unfamiliar with the website. Gambrell (2015) suggests that navigation should be kept simple, because too many options make it difficult for users to find what they need, and this is definitely the case here. That being said, there are only seven links listed under the library heading, which follows the rule of seven, and from the council homepage it only takes three clicks to get to the library catalogue. So while this navigation menu may be off-putting for its sheer size, if a user is lucky enough to stumble across what they’re looking for, they can at least be directed to where they need to go on the website without too much more hassle.
Overall this website is generally well designed. There is a duty of care here shown for community members accessibility issues, as shown by the website colours and the clear images used for navigation. Where the website becomes difficult to use is in the sheer amount of options from the navigation menu making it too much trouble for a user to find what they’re looking for.
References
City of Marion. (n.d.). Libraries. Retrieved from https://www.marion.sa.gov.au/venues-and-facilities/libraries
Gambrell, K. (2015). 7 best practices for creating a user friendly library website. Retrieved from https://www.ebsco.com/blog/article/7-best-practices-for-creating-a-user-friendly-library-website
Government of Western Australia. (n.d.). Tips to make your website accessible. Retrieved from http://www.disability.wa.gov.au/Global/Publications/Understanding%20disability/Built%20environment/Accessible%20websites%20checklist.pdf
Amy Summerton Tech Foundations 