Web Management

Darlene Fichter, Frank Cervone, Jeff Wisniewski

Another extremely packed room - I’m sitting on the floor with about 20 other people!

Jeff Wisniewski:
Yahoo pipes - it’s a feed aggregator. You can apply logic to the feeds (ie., filter the feed in various ways), it’s graphical (no coding involved).
- He uses it to pull in feeds for faculty articles - yahoo pipes brings scopus and something else together into a single feed.

Google My Maps

Yahoo Design Pattern Library:
- a design knowledgebase
- full of best practices for web designers… cool

What is my IP?
www.whatismyipaddress.com
- simply tells you what your IP address is

The Rasterbator: takes images and blows them up big so you can make large banners…

Firefox web developer plugin - very cool

Darlene:

zamzar - web based file converter
gliffy - makes charts and flow charts… web based mapping tool
Firefox linkify
Firefox link checker
pixer.us - web based photo image editing tool
trailfire - web tours
Myxter Tones - custom downloadable ring tones
MyBlogLog - shows actual today’s stats… where your readers came from, what they viewed, create reports over time, narrow by just search results, etc. Wow.
Crazy Egg - click trough rates, most interesting - heat map - shows where the action is taking place on our web pages.. (dude, remember this…)
Swivel - data visualization - import data, create visual graphs.
Many Eyes - visualizations of data… some people have loaded gutenberg texts, and have done tag comparisons… wow.

Frank:

google webmaster tools: diagnostics, site statistics, etc… provides error messages that happened, links tab - shows how many links they have from other sites (using Google’s data), also shows where your pages are linked from…

Google site map - there’s a Google SiteMap Builder - it spiders through your site and creates a sitemap, finds link errors, etc.

oswd (open source web design): look at large number of stylesheets and design templates that are open source.

also showed open source clipart and images, and open source stock photography sites

gvisit - visitor map based on Google statistics…

last.fm: cool music site, mentioned the music suggestion tool it has

open source federated searching - dbWiz - Simon Frazer University - uses z39.50

Keystone ILS - federated search, link resolver, portal creation and management, harvesting metadata afrom remote repositories, etc. Hmm…

audience suggestion: grazr - displays rss feeds on your webpage via a widget

cil2007

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Louis Rosenfeld has started a 5-part series on Information Architecture. Part one includes this:

Step #1: Ban the word “redesign” from your meetings.
Step #2: Determine who your most important audiences are.
Step #3: Determine each primary audience’s 3-5 major needs.
Step #4: Make damned sure your site addresses each of those needs.

Great words of wisdom, I think! Now… who are your library’s most important audiences?

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I just saw Plainfield Public Library’s MySpace page (via Michael Stephens). Well, not really - take a look at the screenshot - their MySpace profile is set to private.

So what? Well… it’s a usability and experience thing. There will be MySpacers that want to peruse the page, see what programs the library has to offer, etc - and not want to sign up to be a friend of the library. By setting their profile to private, the library is basically blocking all their great MySpace content from ALL POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS. It’s sort of like saying “yes, you can enter our library building! Of course! But - do you have a library card? ‘Cause you can ONLY enter our fine library if you have a library card.”

The newspaper article about the page (aside - extremely cool they received press about their MySpace page!) quotes a librarian saying they’ve added more than 80 friends to the site since August. My guess? They’d get more friends if the profile WASN’T set to private.

myspace, social networking, User Experience

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Go read “Court Denies Target.com Plea for Dismissal,” from the Web Site Accessibility Blog. The Federal Court Judge marilyn Hall Patel has ruled that “a retailer may be sued if its website is inaccessible to the blind.”

What Target lost was their plea for dismissal - not the ruling on whether or not federal law on accessibility applies to websites. But stay tuned - it has some HUGE ramifications for those many library websites that aren’t terribly accessible.

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I’ve been thinking through different content types that tend to be presented on library websites. Here’s what I have so far:

1. Traditional Content, or “Stuff we Buy”: this is the no-brainer area. It includes books, videos, music, journals, etc. All the usual stuff that libraries collect.  The main thing to remember here is to be format-agnostic. For example, libraries collect books - paper books, audio books, ebooks, digital audio books, etc. but they’re all books.
2. Original Content, or “Stuff Librarians Create”: Library employees create great content, and most of it should be featured prominently on our websites. Here are some examples of original content: tipsheets on using databases, topical pathfinders (gee, I hate that word),  articles about a topic on a subject guide, and all those “if you like Danielle Steele, try…” Reader’s Advisory  guides. I’d lump in digitized local history content here as well. Much of the read/write web would also appear here (blogs, wikis, etc).
3. Attendable Content, or “Things you Attend or Visit”: My library puts on seminars, classes, storytimes, exhibits, and even concerts once in awhile. All these types of events are “attendable content” - great content, but you have to be there to soak it in.
4. Collaborative Content, or “Interacting with Patrons”: Think of this as content that patrons create or help to create. This can be slightly more traditional, like taking a poll of favorite romance videos (and then placing those results online), or hip and emerging, like commenting on blogs, wiki content added by patrons, etc. But it’s all content coming directly from patrons.
5. Library/Librarians as Content, or “Content About the Library”: This last one is a bit more of a hodge-podge (so if anyone has a better way to explain it, please chime in!). Here, I’m including library services, locations, staff contacts, etc - everything under that “about the library” link found on most library website pages. Steve Krug calls this type of information “Utilities.” Besides all that About stuff, here’s another couple examples of what I’d include in this section: information on your home-bound books program (a library service), or information about free wifi at the library (library service, freebie you can get when using the library).

Am I leaving out anything? Should this small list be expanded? Let me know…

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Take a peek at this cool job-ad… The NYTimes, huge media company, uses Wordpress for their blogs. Granted, they have integrated Wordpress rather nicely on their site, but still…

Whether you’re a big, old media company or a tiny rural library, you can benefit from free, open-source blogging tools!

ps - also take a look at the 37signals Job Board. The job titles are great, for starters (i.e., Rails Ninja, AJAX Hacker, Front End Wizard). But it’s also a great place to see  what cutting-edge skills are needed for current state-of-the-art websites.

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Shane Diffily has a blog, wrote a book on website management, and posted this article (I think to help sell his book). The artcicle states that “website content can typically be classed into one of three types” - then he lists the types of website content - content that ” persuades, sells, and reassures.

I think he’s been hangin’ with corporate types a little too long. For starters, his OWN POST doesn’t really fit into any of the tree categories. I suppose it could be argued that it would be Selling, since he links to info on his book at the end of the article… but is it really? In reality, the actual content is all about providing info (in this case, info on web content). So it’s not Selling (nor is it Reassuring or Persuading).

And what about coding sites telling you how to create Jave widgets? Or, for that matter, the HUGE realm of information-based content (like, say libraries should be putting out)? Nothing on my library’s website is persuading, selling, or reassuring… it’s all about providing information and providing access to that information. That’s what we as libraries do!

Then there’s the whole chunk of the online ENTERTAINMENT industry… is free music on MySpace selling music? Hmm… for that matter - what about the rest of MySpace? Info about me? Definitely not selling, persuading, or reassuring.

Sorta makes you think…

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Webmasters, check out this article: How to Plan Manpower on a Web Team (found at A List Apart). The article provides some pointers on figuring out how many people/hours are needed for web projects - something we could all use!

Shane Diffily (the author) describes website manpower in terms of “scale” - simply put, the larger the website, the more people needed to maintain it. But of course, figuring out size can be complex - some websites are large and database driven, while others are bunches of pages. So Diffily suggests calculating the number of hours required to produce and maintain site content, then using that number to figure out how many web staff are needed to support the site. Makes sense.

Diffily’s article has a couple of useful charts, and much more detail - go check it out!

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I don’t know how she does it, but Sierra’s blog, Creating Passionate Users, always has great posts and provides much thought fodder for me. here are some quotes from a recent post:

• “Good usability is like water flowing downhill”
• “Playing the game should be challenging. The interface should be brainless.”

And an excerpt: “But while my earlier comments on this were mostly about usability, I hadn’t thought of it [the water flowing downhill thing] as a management
principle. (Works great with kids, too) Think about how many procedures
we see in companies that feel like hacks… workarounds for a system
that makes it too easy to make mistakes. And you see it from the
highest levels of business right down to the duct tape someone put over
the switch that you must NEVER EVER TURN OFF.”

Go read the article, and apply it your websites.

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