Week eight: website development

This week’s task is to read two articles and describe how I have used five elements whilst creating my own website. The articles I chose to read are “8 tips to improve your library’s website design” by Piola and “What do the best museum websites do?” by Pat Hadley.

From Hadley: visitor focussed design – what good sites do.

Hadley breaks down what good websites do into three categories: “practical”, which are practical, crucial details such as when and where, cost, etc, “stuff”, which is the actual services offered, and “feeling”, which is how the website and the service should make the user feel. When building my website, I made sure to look at what I was creating through this lens. If something was being put on a page it had to fall into one of those categories and be either informative or add to how I wanted to sell my library.

From Piola: cut links.

Piola recommends that some library websites will put far too many links on a page, cluttering the page and giving too many options to the user when they only need one or two links to get where they’re going. As a result, my website – with the exception of the events page – only has one or two links per page. The events page does have more, but that is because each event links to an Eventbrite page.

From Hadley: layout and images.

Hadley argues that images on a GLAM website are crucial, but the three strongest types are images of the building or grounds, images of the collection itself, and images of visitors. When using images for decoration I ensured to follow these guidelines. I used images of Calgary Public library on the homepage and hours and location page to represent my library. I also used images of people reading or accessing books as a stand-in for visitors to my library. And on the homepage under the search bar I included a large picture of a bookshelf as a representation of the books within the library.

From Piola: watch for jargon.

Piola recommends steering clear of industry jargon in the text of the website so to avoid confusing customers and making them think, but also making the text more difficult to read. Instead I used plain English with smaller words, so that even users with learning disorders or low reading levels would be able to understand what was written.  

From Piola: simplify searching.

Three recommendations were made by Piola in regard to searching on the website:

• “Allow users to toggle between a catalog and website search
• “Include the search bar on every page (like a header or footer)
• “Make searching prominent on the homepage” (2018).

While I did not include the first recommendation on my website, I did use the second and third. On every page I included a search bar in the header just under the navigation, so that the user could predict where it would be from page to page. And on the homepage, while it was sitting under the navigation, it was overlaying an image of the collection, which drew more attention to it, and included a link underneath to access and search the library catalogue.

References

Hadley, P. (2017). What do the best museum websites all do? Retrieved from https://blog.cogapp.com/what-do-the-best-museum-websites-all-do-8d6727504605

Piola. (2018). 8 tips to improve your library’s website design. Retrieved from https://meetpiola.com/8-tips-to-improve-your-librarys-website-design/