Carrie’s LIS Weblog

I read an interesting editorial in the Daily Herald newspaper today about a blogger who’s been sued for libel.  You can read it at http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=80805&src=.  It’s an editorial, so it’s opinion-based rather than fact-based, but it still gives some good information.  Since we’re all blogging now, it’s good to keep this in mind!

Since it’s been a few weeks since my last post, I first just wanted to say that I too thouroughly enjoyed the visit from our Dutch friends!  Now I want to go to the Netherlands so I can check out their library in person.

 Back to my post topic.  Our website review assignment last month couldn’t have come at a more perfect time.  Right around the time I was finishing it up was when my supervisor announced that the library was going to get a website revamp.  He asked our department to look at our portion of the website and do pretty much the same thing Michael asked us to do.  I had to look at the site, write down what I thought worked and didn’t work, offer suggestions for changes or new ideas, etc.  Since I was on the heels of our assignment, I was all gung-ho and had all these suggestions for improving it.  (I love being able to apply the class to work situations, by the way!)

My supervisor then called a meeting and wanted us to share our ideas.  He even brought a laptop and hooked it up to the Internet so we could actually look at the site as we discussed.  He also asked me to share some of what I was doing for our class, so I showed the North Carolina State and Columbia College sites to my co-workers.  I just pointed out a few things like their use of color, categories, photos, etc.  We got a good discussion going and were brainstorming some great ideas.

However, my supervisor then told us that while we had some terrific suggestions, we wouldn’t actually be able to do a lot of them.  Each department must follow a website style manual that the university puts out, and there are stipulations on things such as use of color, heading and margin size, etc.  We just don’t have the creative license to do whatever we want.  I hadn’t thought of this when I was doing the assignment; I just made suggestions with the assumption that it could be done.  But it definitely changes things when you learn you can’t do that.

Naturally, this can be frustrating.  You want your website to be as snappy, easy to use, and user-friendly as possible, but what do you do about the regulations?  Since we aren’t able to change the rules right now, we’ve made some simple changes that have really made a difference, even if they’re not what we had first envisioned.  Our department’s old site, for example, was not organized at all and was what one of my former co-workers called the “toilet paper site”–it just kept scrolling and scrolling.  But my supervisor organized all the links into categories–thus greatly minimizing the scrolling–and added a photo of students in the library.  That already made it seem much more user-friendly.  He also added a link to the library’s newest service–a podcast.  Since we are a performing arts library, a podcast seems ideal for music and theater students (this month it’s on the life and music of Silvestre Revueltas), and is a great addition to the site.

While we can’t do everything on the site that we want to, just making some small but ultimately major changes can make a difference.  So when you don’t have the creative freedom, you just have to do what you can, keep your patrons in mind, and try to make it as user-friendly as possible.