Cuyahoga County Public Library
Where the library was…
they wanted to be a portal – have a customizabe customer experience
wanted to reach new audiences
weren’t quite sure what their customers wanted
created an rfp
Implementation of the website – by the website company…
discovery:
focus groups for the community – variety of types (ie., kids, teens, seniors, etc)
competitive research – looked at other library websites (bad idea, in my opinion… libraries aren’t competing with other libraries – they’re competing with amazon, barnes & noble, etc…
strategy:
mini portals – subjects, demographics, etc based mini portals… subject guides
needed a CMS that could handle blogs, rss, etc – new functionality
needed event management functionality
Ektron – their new CMS (dot net…)
Catalog – III
Federated Searc – webfeat
text messaging…
wanted to integrate all this stuff
cost – $150,000 – sounds pricey… but for what they bought, that’s about right for an outside web design firm to create a large-scale website.
I just checked out of the whole note taking thing, and am browsing their new site… some thoughts:
– kidspace – it’s not for kids – it’s for parents (just a quick visual look at the page)
– I’d say the same thing for the teens page
– I think with both the kids and the teens page, they most likely have great stuff for those user groups – but the main kids and teens page both look more like a hallmark cards page – very corporate.
they just mentioned they have more phases to implement. They have a great start – keep innovating!