10 Things You Can Do to Make Your Library Site Better Right Now! (International Ballroom East) – Laura Solomon, Library Services Manager, Ohio Public Library Information Network
Don't use library acronyms on the library website (at least first time)
Avoid large chunks of texts – Stephen Crug (Don't Make Me Think) – When you write text for the web, write your text, cut it in half, and then cut it in half again. People want to scan.
Don't bother patrons with mission statements – don't put it on the front page. People don't care about mission statements, board members, etc. so much that they need it on the front page.
Weed your graphics. Evaluate every graphic used on the website. Each graphic costs attention space and download time.
Clip art is evil. It's unprofessional. It's better to use stock photography. Paid stuff can be less than $1 a picture.
Don't waste prime real-estate with weather & news gadgets. People don't go to the library website for weather and news.
Don't say “Come to our cool program!!!!” - don't use exclamation points. Professionals don't use them.
Don't put a welcome mat on the website – use the front page real-estate wisely.
Don't put a photograph of the library building on the front of the website. Your logo is your brand. Use your brand. Don't use the building as a brand.
Put the library's phone number & address on the front page.
Most of this stuff we do (or don't do) as necessary for compliance. I could see and argument that we put a welcome mat (eat up valuable space) on the website with the pictures we rotate there, and we don't have a strong brand/logo presence.
Solving Problems with Free Tools - Alex Zeeland, Stacia Avel, Jonathan Newton from Arlington Public Library
The Arlington Public Library presented on their struggles with trying to be creative within a structure provided by the Arlington County website (they are a county agency and have this requirement).
They created a news blog and tagged the news appropriately to make it show up in places that make sense. They post summaries of news to Facebook/Twitter and linked back to their news blog. They used Blogger for their news blog platform. They then used Yahoo! Pipes to make specialized feeds using the Google tags. And finally Feedburner was used for display.
It's interesting to see a library serving a population area of this size (~215K, 8 branches) using this approach. It basically gave them a more sophisticate content management system (via the mature Blogger platform) plugged into what they found to be an inadequate county-provided CMS. This approach (as implemented) does require getting Blogger to present data in a way that's not totally incongruous with the design of your website, but the basic way of dealing with the problem is quite interesting (using one CMS to fill in holes in another CMS).
The finished fruit of the Arlington Public Library's labor can be seen at http://library.arlingtonva.us/
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