New site feedback request

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duckydan's picture

Hi,

Just about to put our new Chattanooga Public Library site live. I was wondering if any library Drupal gurus would like to look and provide criticism. NOT fishing for praise, just wondering if my peers notice anything that could be improved via module or theme change, etc.

http://dev.chattlibrary.org

Theme is based on Omega 3. Lots and lots of module.

admin_menu
advagg
advanced_help
ais
backup_migrate
bundle_copy
calendar
captcha
chosen
ckeditor
conditional_fields
context
css_browser_selector
ctools
data
date
date_ical
delete_all
email
entity
entityreference
features
field_formatter_settings
field_group
field_multiple_limit
field_permissions
filefield_sources
filter_perms
flexslider
flickr
fontyourface
geofield
geophp
getlocations
globalredirect
google_analytics
honeypot
httprl
imagecache_actions
inline_entity_form
insert
jcarousel
jquery_update
libraries
link
linkchecker
login_destination
logintoboggan
media
media_vimeo
media_youtube
memcache
menu_block
metatag
mobile_detect
module_filter
mollom
node_export
pathauto
phpmailer
publishcontent
quicktabs
read_more

Comments

Looks great to me! A couple

nicmatts's picture

Looks great to me! A couple of changes I might make:

  1. I find the font for the paragraph text a little hard to read. Maybe make it a little bigger or change the color?
  2. I would probably move the search box right under the logo to make it more noticeable, and move the social media links where the search box is. Maybe like this.

Only local images are allowed.

Great work!

Took your advice. Thanks.

duckydan's picture

Took your advice. Thanks.

new site review

ninermac's picture

Congrats!!! Overall visually, really like it! (I know you said you didn't want praise, but tough, I'm going to give it.) I really like the focus on content--both web and library content--particularly the absence of a gigantic fat footer full of crap nobody wants. ;)

One suggestion: have you done any accessibility auditing? I gave it a quick run through WebAIM's WAVE and VoiceOver on my MacBook, and:

  1. No alt text for the social link icons-easy fix. ;)
  2. No form label-it's not clear to a screen reader what that search box is for (although I know sometines embedded catalog code gets cranky with form labels because vendors LOVE writing standard code...)
  3. VoiceOver seems to gets thrown into a loop by the slider-not sure why.
  4. The book jacket carousels are problematic since there's no alt text or any other data (that I saw in my uberquick review) to indicate what those objects are.

Nina McHale
@ninermac
Developer
Aten Design Group

Accessibility auditing is a

duckydan's picture

Accessibility auditing is a great idea. Did not think of that.

I can't say much about the

calebtr's picture

I can't say much about the modules - if you've got the functionality you need, then awesome.

One note though, you are using logintoboggan and login_destinatoin but have no link to your login screen. Is there a whole hidden side of your site?

Regarding the theme and IA, I have lots of opinions, which you can take or leave as just that, or run the whole site by your users of course:

I see a lot of wasted space near the top of the screen. Your 4th floor/Twitter/Facebook icons show up on their own line. Could these be merged into the same horizontal area as the navigation bar?

I think it is also confusing that the 4th floor is categorically a different thing than your facebook and twitter accounts, but they are grouped together as icons.

You have 4 book sliders, each with a header. You have eight articles underneath the book sliders, each with a much smaller header/title. What goes here? Why should I look at it? Could it be helpful to add categories to these? eg Teens, Kids - I see they are content from your tabs etc.

I'd love to see kids events in the kids page - maybe as a mini-calendar in the block? I am not going to think to go to 'events' for storytime. Maybe your users do.

Consider moving 'get a library card' out of the footer and into a more prominent place. The footer is the place you put things you know you have to have on your website, but few people ever look at. "Get a library card" is a clear call to action - don't you want more people to get library cards?

I love the faces on the about page - I wish that wasn't buried as well but there might not be a better place for it.

Without a 'search this site', did you consider a sitemap that patrons can browse if they can't figure out the navigation? I think they're out of favor. I personally could not find any info about your reference and interlibrary loan services. Maybe you don't offer these?

Answers

duckydan's picture

Thank you for your great feedback.

Only library staff log in. The public uses an ILS (Polaris).

I have tweaked the white space. The space to the right of the main navigation bar is reserved for new or temporary menu items.

The 4th Floor will become one of the main navigation items and be removed from the social media icons.

I have added upcoming events for all the pages (branch, and by subject). The Kids page shows it as an example. The events will need to be tagged, and that will come when I convert content just before the roll-out. My boss may veto some of this, but I like it so far.

Get a library card is now at the top.

Not sure about the site map.

Thanks.

Mobile access

beanworks's picture

Looks and works well on my Android Galaxy phone (nice job), but the icon links at the top don't work (4th floor, twitter, facebook).

Also, one small gripe: the lighter text (grey) is hard to read on the phone because it is small. I do't think it's as much of a problem on bigger screens, but I do think the trend to lower contrast greys as acceptable text color is a bad move. :)

Carol Bean

I wanted to thank you all for

duckydan's picture

I wanted to thank you all for the feedback. The site is live now at chattlibrary.org

I took many of the suggestions made here and acted on them.

We have also done some small work on accessibility as was suggested, and will continue to enhance that.

Thank you very much.

Well done!

nicmatts's picture

I think it looks really good. I don't know if your library knows how hard you worked to build your site, but I do. High five! :)

Nice

darrell_ulm's picture

Clean look, nice.

On the books page, like the jcarousel of book covers. Clean.

Events page also looking good.

Like other mentioned, the whole site worked well in a responsive way to auto format to mobile devices.

Well done.

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