Archive for the ‘Design’ Category

Sarah Houghton-Jan, the Librarian in Black, has completely redesigned her blog which she’s migrated from Typepad to Wordpress. The design and features are fantastic as is the content so be sure to update your RSS feed and bookmarks!

Steven Snell of DesignMag outlines 17 different content management applications which can be used to create powerful websites. The article includes a brief description of each of these solutions, a screenshot, and a list of relevant resources for those interested in finding out more. There are many here which I hadn’t heard of before and I look forward to checking them out.

Are you redesigning your website or creating a new one for your organization? Get some great advice on how to properly design and code your site for optimal usability and search engine optimization from this rap video.

Heather Johnson at BestCollegesOnline writes about ways to improve usability in libraries. This thorough guide provides helpful links and annotations and is divided into the following sections:

• General
• Website
• Catalog & Search
• Availability
• Staff
• Library Environment
• Interaction
• Computers
• Equipment
• Kid Friendly
• Fun Tools

Are you thinking about a website redesign using a content management system such as Drupal or Joomla? If so, you’ll want to stop by Web Distortion where they have reviewed 13 Free CMS Options for Web Design Professionals. Each comprehensive review details the features, setup time, supported OS and other technology, as well as urls and an analysis. These are the applications they cover:

• Typo 3
• Cushy CMS
• Made by Frog
• Radiant CMS
• Modx CMS
• SilverStripe
• Alfresco
• Typolight
• DotCMS
• Umbraco
• CMS Made Simple
• Drupal
• Mambo

If you have a blog which uses the Blogger platform, you will want to check out these listings from Mashable of 70 Fresh And Modern Blogger Templates, 50 More Beautiful Blogger Templates, and 30+ Templates & Tools for Blogger.

You might also want to check out these 50 Free Icon Sets available at The Web Squeeze.

Smashing Magazine has created a series of articles spotlighting free, first-class themes for WordPress blogs. Bloggers who use this platform will want to head over and take a look as they present screenshots for each theme.

20 More Free First-Class Wordpress Themes
100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes
83 Beautiful WordPress Themes
21 Fresh, Usable and Elegant Themes
10 Fresh and Clean Themes

Smashing Magazine has written an in-depth and illustrated guide to Web design. Anyone who is interested in usability and user-centered design may want to check out their approach:

1. Don’t make users think
2. Don’t squander users’ patience
3. Manage to focus users’ attention
4. Strive for feature exposure
5. Make use of effective writing
6. Strive for simplicity
7. Don’t be afraid of the white space
8. Communicate effectively with a “visible language”
9. Conventions are our friends
10. Test early, test often

via UX Magazine

The beginning of the new year has inspired many of us to undertake the daunting task of redesigning our websites, or to create new ones. I have just finished a complete redesign of my website, and thought it would be helpful to pass along the links and research that I did in the process.

Free Website Templates
Why start from scratch when you can download a free, professional-looking website that you can customize and make your own? These template downloads include everything you’ll need to get started including the page code, graphics, and CSS.

• Open Source Web Design - Fantastic website with over 2,000 free design downloads including blog templates.
• Free Layouts - Over 500 free downloads here including MySpace and blog templates.

Free Hosted Website Builders
These websites not only provide easy-to-use website building tools, and often drag-and-drop AJAX editors, so that you can get a website up and running in no time, but they will host the website for you.

• Weebly - Over 30 starter templates to choose from, and easy drag-and-drop interface, and Weebly will let you use your own domain or they will host your website for you.
• Webjam - Create personal or group, public or private pages in this community by dragging modules onto a page.
• Pagii - Personal webpage or digital scrapbook creator which lets you drag-and-drop images and other content anywhere on your pages.
• Freewebs - This site creator has over 300 website templates to choose from, websites can include blogs, chat rooms, forums, photos which can be edited by Picnik, and videos. More than 17 million websites created here.



• Jimdo - Easy website creation tool which will let you copy the design of other websites.
• SiteKreator - This easy to use design tool has both free and paid options, offering unlimited pages and 10 MB of hosted space.
• SynthaSite - A lot of functionality available in this website creator with drag-and-drop widgets including a Flickr search, easy YouTube, Metacafe, and other video embedding, and RSS.

Widgets
Spice up any website or blog with additional content being drawn in by a widget. Here are some examples, but find more at Widgetbox.

• MeeboMe - Embed an IM chat widget.
• Hyplet - Create a Hyplet blogger’s box with all of your contact info and pic.



• Eventful - If you are a writer, speaker, or performer of any type, you can list your events with Eventful and then pull them into your website via a widget which you can style yourself via your own CSS, or just use theirs.
• Slideshare - Display your PowerPoint presentations on your website by embedding them with the Slideshare widget.
• tumblr - Aggregate all of the content you create on your blogs, Flickr, del.icio.us, Facebook, Twitter, and other accounts and then embed your tumblr into your website. (This one’s a bit advanced, but looks great!)

Images
If you’re looking for free stock images to use on your website, there are plenty of places you can go. Here are some starting points.

• Creative Commons Search on Flickr
• Find free images online - my list! - Great list from Hey Jude
• Where can you find good images? - Presentation Zen list

Website Analytics Tools
After all that hard work, you may want to know how many visitors you’re getting and where they’re coming from. Here are some free tools to help you do just that.

• Sitemeter - This tool is very straightforward and easy to digest. The free version will display the number of visitors to your website or blog, their page views, the last 100 referring URLs which led them to your site, and many other statistics.
• For more, see Read/Write Web’s writeup of 10 Free, Innovative Web Analytics Tools.

Thanks to Rhonda Gonzales @ the library, who writes about Blogs as Websites for libraries.

What she offers is an introduction to an OPAC which presents information with TAGS and comments - just like a blog - while still incorporating bibliographic data. This is taxonomy with a folksonomy ‘look and feel’. A most interesting development.

One of the most impressive is Plymouth State University’s Lamson Library. Take a look at their beta site: http://lamson.wpopac.com/library. If you do a catalog search, the results are posted to the site like blog postings complete with comments. You can also browse the catalog or the whole site by drilling down through categories, etc.

This site is built on a product called Scriblio (formerly WPopac) which describes itself as “Scriblio (formerly WPopac) - an award winning, free, open- source CMS and OPAC with faceted searching and browsing features based on WordPress“. Scriblio is not available for general use at the present, but learn more about it at About Scriblio.

[From:FIKSZ.3 NDRGRND]

You can often find great examples of libraries who have already redesigned and reformulated themselves for the digital world. However there is not always a lot written about the processes involved in undertaking this change.

An excellent Australian paper A Prototype 21st Century University Library: a case study of change at the University of New South Wales focuses on the organizational change involved in a library involved in constructing a new future for itself. It has added relevance for our [school] libraries as it focuses on an academic library that needs to support teaching and learning activities much in the same way that we need to.

[From: Bibliosphere News]