Designing the Digital Experience
presented by David Lee King.

David told us that basically this is a 30 minute, presentation version of his book by the same name (which I had heard about before and was why I wanted to attend this session).

There are three paths to the experience:

Structure – Create an experience by making the website easier to use. A well designed experience should stay out of the users’ way. You should focus on developing parts of your site that users visit often. Don’t spend too much time on things users only do once a year. Look at your website with a critical eye, think about what would make people stumble. Figure out goals from there, don’t forget the “don’t make them think” philosophy.

Community – Provide a memorable experience though the online community. This can be done through conversations, connections and invitations (social networking aspects), participation, sense of familiarity, and telling our stories.

Customer – Extend the users’ real world experience into the digital space (i.e. more information to engage users about your product or service). This can be done through customer journey mapping (which can provide insight and organizational focus), and improving the ordinary experiences.

Through these three paths, you can connect the customer to products, staff, other customers, and the “extras” that can enhance their digital experience. Create an “experience stage” and work on conversation. Enhancing users’ online experiences will make them better users of your library in the real world. Change is coming. It can be hard, but well worth the effort in the end.

Strategies for Improving Website Performance using Google Analytics
presented by Marshall Breeding

Marshall started off his talk with some scary statistics from OCLC studies:

• Users typically do not begin their research at the library website. Only 2% of those in the study said they did. Most start their research on sites like Google.
• In the period from 2005-2007, those that said they used library websites dropped from 30% to 20%. During that same period the use of other websites in general went up

In his presentation Marshall suggested a close examination of website statistics can help remedy the situation. It’s important to track all resources (catalog, databases, etc.), and pay attention to the flow of use among all the library’s web-based resources. Don’t forget the flow from higher-level websites and portals (university site, courseware, etc.)

Marshall recommends using the free Google Analytics tool on your website, which gathers data dynamically (no server logs) and presents the data in aggregated patterns of use which are very easy to read.

When analyzing the data, go beyond simply page counts. Identify sessions, categorize users (students, faculty, etc.), determine use patterns, and measure interest (i.e. time spent on the site, bounce rate, and page overlay analysis).

Once you have the data, you can come up with goals for the website (i.e. more visits to specific pages or resources), look at the current benchmarks, implement goal oriented improvements to your site, measure the new impact, and repeat as needed.

I’ve already had Google Analytics installed on my library’s website, but I haven’t taken advantage of many of the features that are available. After hearing Marshall’s presentation, I’m anxious to to that.

Cool Tools for Webmasters
presented by Darlene Fichter and Frank Cervone

This session was kind of a quick-fire presentation where Darlene and Frank showed us all kinds of useful, interesting and just fun tools for webmasters. They’ll be posting their slides with everything they talked about at http://library2.usask.ca/~fichter/cool_tools/ (which also has slides from past “cool tools” presentations). Here are a few of the ones that struck my fancy:

• Widgenie – create graphs as widgets you can use on your site
• Freemind – mind mapping software, can help with brainstorming (this was also mentioned in the preconference session I was at yesterday
• TrueCrypt – open source encryption software (great for portable flash or hard drives)
• BrowserShots – get screenshots of how your website displays in a multitude of browsers and operating systems
• Feng-GUI – creates heatmaps of a web page based on an algorithm that predicts what a human eye will focus on and how it scans a site

Some other interesting tidbits I learned:

Have a “prenup” when deciding on a content management system. Should a “divorce” occur, will you be able to export your data and use it with another CMS? An exit strategy is just as important as the choice of which CMS to use.

SWOT analysis can be useful for website design (I knew how valuable it was for other things, but never considered using it for web design).

It could be much more efficient, and less daunting if a website redesign is rolled out in phases, instead of having a long gestation period until the completed site is “born.” The current trend in web redesign is for constant improvement, although sometimes a complete tear down is necessary.

Project management tools and techniques can be very useful, if not essential to a successful redesign.

Finally, a few links from the presenters list of recommended resources:

• Stanford Web Credibility Research
• Library Terms that User’s Understand from John Kupersmith
• Usable Web from Keith Instone
• Research Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines

One of the long term projects I’ve been involved with at work was quietly unveiled this week, the Edgewood History Collection.

The project is a collaboration between myself and several other members of the library staff. My responsibility involved designing and developing the collection’s Home and About pages, as well as the page templates for the digital collection management software (the pages that actually display the items in the collection). The software we’re using is a hosted version of ContentDM.

Some of the things in the Edgewood History Collection I found interesting include:

Effigy Mounds at Edgewood. It’s fascinating to think about the ancient peoples that lived on the land the college now occupies.

From part 1 of the History of Edgewood College narrative: “[In 1881] Former Governor Washburn decides to give away his Madison estate. Accounts maintain that he offers it to the Sisters only after being turned down by the University, the city of Madison, and the State, all of whom supposedly claim it is too remote, being two miles from town.”

I’ll bet the University would love to have this “remote” location now…

Sacred Heart Academy, which cost $36,719 to build in 1894.

Summer Concert on the Lawn (from the mid-1950′s). Those hot summers must have been uncomfortable for the sisters in their long black habits.

An aerial view of the Edgewood Campus, circa 1960.

Finally, a picture of the Library which I took on a beautiful spring day a few years ago.

The Edgewood History Collection is the first digital collection from the Edgewood College Archives (which is part of the Library). We hope to unveil other digital collections in the future. Stay tuned.

I did go back and add larger versions to quite a few previously posted photos. Some of my favorites include the posts: North Woods Camping, The Butterfly and Aurora over Franklin. I’ll probably add more as time permits.

Since adding Highslide involved updating this site’s stylesheet, you might want to refresh the page to make sure you’re getting the new changes.

For you web geeks out there, Highslide will open the image to full size, or as large as will fit in the user’s browser window (the user can expand the photo to full size if they wish). The base script is fairly large (43k), but using the script’s configurator, and only adding the components I want, I got it down to about 17k (packed). I am running it in unobtrusive mode, which keeps the javascript and the markup separate. It also degrades nicely if javascript is turned off in the user’s browser.

XRAY is a brilliant little bookmarklet. Just click it, and then click on any element in the web page you’re viewing. XRAY will show you information on class, ID, inheritance hierarchy, position, size, margins, padding, etc.

XRAY works with Firefox, Safari, Camino, and Mozilla. Found via Zeldman.

Better Writing Through Design from A List Apart makes a case for focusing on the written word, and gives tips on writing better copy for your website.

Great web design reflects the way we interact, and the primary vehicle for that interaction remains text. We share, we chat, we comment, we tag, and we do it all via the written word.

Smiley Cat Web Design posts 10 Things You May Not Know About the Web Developer Toolbar. What a great list. Among the features I didn’t know:

• Edit HTML: I use edit CSS all the time, but I had no idea you could edit the HTML. Sweet!
• View Color Information: Get a complete list of colors (and their HTML codes) used on the site.
• Display Element Information: View class, id, attributes, ancestors, position, etc. of any element.
• And a bonus from the comments (more good tips there), CTRL-SHIFT-Y shows you the styles associated with an element.

Found via 9rules Design Community.

Update, July 13: It seems Google has changed the parameters of the player and it no longer works properly. The good news is I have found a decent player which I can install on this site.

Above is the Audio Player developed by Martin Laine. It’s available as a WordPress plugin, and a standalone player (which is what I’m using).

By the way, the song “What Light,” is from Sky Blue Sky, Wilco’s excellent new release.

With the new design, the list of my current musical recommendations has been moved from its own page to the home page. Any web geeks out there may be interested to know that the entire site is now managed through WordPress (not just the blog entries). Those static html pages are so twentieth century…

So the previous design isn’t lost to the ages, I have archived a sample of it on a separate page. If you get nostalgic for the old Shield Swoop Design, feel free to go there and reminisce.

Update:
I discovered a few minor issues with how the Internet Explorer 6 was displaying the new design, which have been fixed. See any other problems? Just let me know.

Visually, I designed the new catalog to have an appearance that compliments the look of the library’s web site (with a similar header and footer on each page). Marketing types would probably use the word “branding” here somewhere. Some new features have also been unveiled along with the catalog’s new look. Check out the news blurb from the library web site for details.

As far as what’s going on “under the hood” of the new catalog, this project was probably the most challenging assignment for me in my web career so far. Challenging for a couple of reasons. First, the design had to wrap around the library’s catalog software, which is produced by Innovative Interfaces. That involved learning all of the options, setup files, and quirks of their software. Second, as one who strives to use web standards while developing for the web, Innovative’s use of non-standards code was a bit frustrating. To those of you not familiar with web standards, having non-compliant code can cause browsers to display your pages in unexpected ways. To their credit, the folks at Innovative do recognize the importance of web standards and are making improvements as new versions are released.

A great deal of the design of the site was inspired by architectural elements of the library building. I created the header logo to mimic the window and roof lines of the building facade and the graphic at the footer on each page was inspired by the shape of the building. The official Edgewood colors were used (red and black) along with some shades of gray.

As for the technical aspects of the site, the markup was done in XHTML (version 1.0, strict) and I used some of the most advanced Cascading Style Sheets I’ve ever used on a website. I am a big advocate for web standards and I stayed true to that philosophy when creating this site.

I also incorporated some ASP scripting into the website, which was a first for me. While I didn’t write the actual scripts used, I was fortunate to find some useful scripts which I altered (one with the help of Edgewood’s Network Administrator) and got to work well with the site. I’m looking forward to learning more ASP and incorporating more dynamically driven pages into the site in the future.