David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

Don’t Set Your MySpace Page Profile to Private!

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library myspace pageI 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.

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Find the Title of this Page

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teen pageWhat’s the title of this page? Here are your options, by just taking a quick glance at the page:

  • Teens News (title tag, small type under large “start pages” text in orange box)
  • Start Pages (highlighted text in both orange areas, highlighted text in blue menu)
  • Teens’ News (highlighted text in left-hand menu and in larger orange box breadcrumb link)
  • Teens’ News Detail (phrase found by carrot – underneath orange box)
  • Teens Feature Highlights (text dropped in an outlined box)
  • Teen (largest text on page – but also most difficult to see)
  • audience_teens_features (from the URL)

I’m not picking on Seattle – just using them as an example (I’m sure I’ve made similar pages!). Good, simple IA practice would tell us that:

  • we need to pick one of these titles for the page, and name everything else the same
  • this page needs fewer words that look like titles
  • the page file name (audience_teens_features) needs to match the title of the page
  • The breadcrumb link (if you must include one) needs to match the name of the page
  • The title, breadcrumb link, page file name, etc should all match
  • Most importantly – anything in a larger font size looks like a title – you need to make sure it IS a title!
  • Also important – anything you highlight will look like a title – make it so

Now – take a peek at your own website – how does it fare compared to this example? What improvements can you make?

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Jeffrey Veen’s Next Gen Web Design Presentation

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Veen’s presentation on Next Generation Web Design and Web 2.0 rocks. It rocks on many levels:

  1. It uses great presentation design… the slides look cool, they’re very visual, and you can get the gist of his message by just looking through the slides (but you can also tell you’re missing alot of good content, too)
  2. It shows a “where design is headed” roadmap

So… web dudes and other interested parties – go check it out!

Make Subscribing to Blogs Easy

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alablogThere’s one little thing that bugs me about blog design/usability – it’s where most of us place the Syndicate this Blog section… usually at the BOTTOM OF THE PAGE, and usually hidden in arcane geek language.

Generally, the syndicate/rss info is placed at the bottom of a blog site because that’s where the blog software designer / skin creator originally placed that info. For example, an out-of-the-box WordPress blog sticks the RSS feed info down at the bottom of the page, and calls it … of all things… Meta, then lists Entries RSS and Comments RSS as links. A new Blogger blog doesn’t even include the feed info on the page – you have to add it manually (most people don’t).

The image included in this post is ALA’s Member blog. Believe me, I’m not picking on ALA here – I think it’s great that they have gone from GormanGate to having a blog for members! But I just discovered the blog this morning, and it reminded me that I needed to write a post about blogs… And it’s a great example of a good, useful blog that can be made better and even more useful with a couple of itty-bitty changes.

Anyway, look what ALA has done with their RSS info – it’s at the bottom of the blog page in a section named Syndicate This Blog. To their credit, they’ve also linked to a page explaining RSS.

Why does that bug me? Because while all of us highly geek’d out blog readers generally know where to look and what to look for when hunting down an RSS feed, there’s a far greater percentage of people who don’t really know what RSS, Atom, syndication, or Meta is, and don’t really know where to look for this info.

What should change here? On the ALA Member blog, here are a few things I would change:

  • Call the section Subscribe to this Feed or something similar
  • Bump the Subscribe to this Feed section up to the top of the page (either over or under the blog summary/introduction thing)
  • Have someone write a better What is RSS explanation, rather than linking to someone else’s (in ALA’s case, the explanation they chose to link to isn’t very good, there are misspellings, etc, etc… and I think they have someone working at ALA who could probably write a decent, down-to-earth explanation… 🙂
  • OK… while I’m at it, in ALA’s case, I’d add some text in the html Title tag section… right now, all it says is “memberblog.” They could add some hearty meta-text about ALA…
  • And I’d remove the Valid XHTML, Valid CSS etc links in the footer section of the site. No one really cares about that stuff – and the ones that do can figure it out pretty easily, if needed.

Why should this change? Again, I know what all that RSS stuff means. But most librarians don’t. So:

  • change the wording a little (from syndicate to subscribe) and they’ll quickly have a mental picture of what that means.
  • Move the link to the feed from the bottom of the page to the top of the page, and newbies who want to subscribe don’t have to search for the link.
  • Write a clear “what is this” explanation, and use it as a teaching tool – SHOW how easy it is to subscribe to a blog (do a screencast using Camptasia); point people to Bloglines, My Yahoo, etc.
  • And point them to all your great blogs, if you have more than one – in ALA’s case, they at least have this one and an ALA news feed, for example!

Making these little changes on your blogs will help guide your future blog readers (translation: your members, your patrons, your customers) to your feeds, will hopefully make the “subscribe to this feed” process easier for them, will introduce them to your range of blogs, and will possibly teach them something, too.

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Check out Gliffy

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Testing out GliffyReally – 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. Visio, while useful, has a definite learning curve, is pricey, and if probably overkill for most of us library website managers. All we really need (if we’re interested in wireframing a website) is a simple illustration or graphics application, and it’d sure be dandy if it had built-in presets for things like search buttons, textboxes, and other normal web thingies.

And that’s where Gliffy comes into play. It’s a great and easy online tool for wireframe, user interface, and web layout. Here’s a quick example to the right – this was done using Gliffy. I know it’s basic – but that’s me, not Gliffy’s fault. Here’s a link to a screencast showing how to use Gliffy to create a wireframe. It’s really pretty simple.

Also, here’s a link showing Gliffy’s wireframe example, and a link showing a web layout example.

So – go try it out!