Web Design 2.0

Over the past month I've been spending a lot of time on our website looking at how it's arranged and working to put together a different, and hopefully more intuitive, design. It's been an interesting process. This was one of the first things that I did when I began my position here and I felt like I didn't do it very well. While it's true I had some stipulations with the design, I feel like mostly, it just didn't work. And there has been nothing so frustrating as watching people struggle with where to go and how to get there and knowing that ultimately, it was my responsibility that it wasn't good enough.

Enter design dos. I'm hoping this will be better because A) I've worked with the current site and I know what really doesn't work, and B) We have a design team who recognizes that the library site is a tool first and foremost, and therefore must be designed accordingly.

So the last few weeks I have spent organizing the current links into a different tree. I've learned the meaning and purpose of Website Wireframing and redesigning a website tree and so forth. I've also spent a significant amount of time actually looking at other library websites and seeing what others have done to hopefully pull some of these things into our new design. We met with the design team today and so I'm hoping that when we receive some wire frames back in a few weeks, that the ideas I've suggested will be incorporated into the design. Hopefully it'll all work well. If it doesn't, this will be very sad!