Check out Gliffy

Really - go check Gliffy out (also mentioned by Stephen Abram and the Librarian in Black). Now. Especially if you are in charge of your library’s website or mess around with web design.
What is Gliffy? Gliffy is a free, online version of Microsoft’s Visio, which is a flowchart, diagramming, layout, floorplan designing kind of software. [...]

David’s First Experiment with Screencasting

I’ve wanted to play around with screencasting for awhile now, and recently when looking at job ads, it dawned on me - why not make a screencast of some bad website usability? That way, I can test out screencasting and at the same time, provide something marginally usaful to my blog, too.
So… here it is. [...]

CSS Primer Using Dreamweaver 8

For those library website designers out there who are just starting to experiment with using CSS instead of tables, this article is an excellent place to start.
The article explains how to set up Dreamweaver 8 for CSS styling, and then how to build a basic webstie using CSS for positioning rather than tables.
Have fun!

CIL2006 - Slides from My Presentation on Experience Planning

Here’s a link to my slides from my presentation at the Computers in Libraries conference. I presented a session titled “The Basics of Web-Based Experience Planning.” Other people have blogged about it here, here, and here.
cil2006

10 Reasons to Love Web 2.0 - from a Flickr Dude

These are notes I took while listening to a podcast of Cal Henderson from Flickr, titled “From Web Site to Web Application - Ten Reasons to Love Web 2.0.”, who spoke at “The Future of Web Apps” conference. You can find it (and a lot of others) on the Carson Workshops/Summit website.
 Cal’s definition of web 2.0: “Web [...]

10 Easy Steps to a Horrible ILS

I just read this article, and thought some of the points made really compare to the ILS discussion going on right now. First, a little explanation - the point of the original article is to point out rather obvious ways to ruin an ecommerce site. But, some of those points translate nicely to our beloved [...]

Sweet Staff Intranet

Check out this nice-looking staff intranet - for a library. It’s very nicely done! Some features (from the flickr set): 

blog posts with RSS feeds and comments
major links via tabs at the top
more links on the left and right
a shared calendar
it is searchable
They’ve included some wiki functionality (every page can be edited) and a recent changes [...]

Building a Cool Children’s Website

My library is in the process of planning a new, hip children’s website… and I thought some of you might find our plans interesting. So - go check out our Request for Quotation (RFQ) that I posted today.
We think there’s some pretty cool stuff there for kids - I’d love to hear what others think!

Random Thought #2

Another thought, probably originating from listening to Abram:
Our next big set of customers are kids and teens right now. I could even stretch that out a bit to include 20-somethings. Are we really marketing to them?
Right now, most public library websites have a page or so devoted to kids, and the same for teens. Then [...]

Random Thought #1

[Update: not so random after all - I probably heard Stephen Abram say this at Internet Librarian]
As I’m starting to re-write our website plan, I’m having some random thoughts… they don’t necessarily go in the plan, but might be useful nonetheless. So I’m posting them as they come.
Random Thought #1: Go where your customers already [...]

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