 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. You can always watch our archived recordings at your convenience, and I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all those archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in anything of the topics we have on our show. For those of you not here in Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries in Nebraska, similar to your state library in other states in the United States, so we provide training and services and consultation and grants to all types of libraries in the state of Nebraska. So you will find things on our show for public libraries, academics, K-12, corrections, museums, archives, anything and everything that you can think of that might be something that has a library will be on the show. So we pretty much run, that's really our only criteria is something to do with libraries, something cool that libraries are doing, services and products we think they might be interested in. We do book reviews, interviews, many training sessions sometimes, demos of various services and products. Sometimes we have Nebraska Library Commission staff come on and do presentations about things and services are specifically offering here in Nebraska, but we also bring guest speakers sometimes, and that's what we have with us this morning as a guest speaker. But before we get into today's show, I just want to do a quick reminder for our Nebraska libraries here. I'm going to pop over here to our library commission main webpage. We are still in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, so here for our Nebraska libraries, we have resources available for you as a library to help you deal with this current situation. They give a list where we are keeping track of libraries who report to us or who we find by just looking at their websites, Facebook pages, social media, whatever. Wish libraries and specifically just in Nebraska, open, closed, special accommodations, Wi-Fi in the parking lot, curbside pickup, whatever their situation is. We also have a post here that is pinned to the top of our library commission webpage, which is specifically about COVID-19 and pandemic resources where libraries can reach out to us. And then we have some maps we've put together too for Nebraska libraries, but this is the main page here, our pandemic page with lots of information depending on your situation. I just see some things here, not specific just for libraries. If I need financial help, what do I do with my kids, et cetera, et cetera. But our library page right here has some really good resources for libraries. Some of this is specific to Nebraska, some of it is just broad for anybody. So I want to make sure our libraries in Nebraska know, go here, we are keeping up on what's going on with the pandemic and what resources are available to help libraries specifically. If there's been a new report, a webinar coming up, a webinar recorded, more information, things like that, it's available on here. Information about how to reopen your library, if that is something you are thinking about doing, holding meetings, the open meetings act, examples of other library policies, if you need something to work on, to use to build yours. Summer reading, which I know we're somewhere in the middle of still. We here in Nebraska have paid for reader zone for all of our libraries, public libraries in the state have access to. So lots and lots of resources here. I highly will recommend the realm project, reopening our archives libraries and museums. This is OCLC, IMLS are doing actual research, this is specific for libraries. And this is for, there's lots of information out there about COVID-19 and what it is and what it is and does it stay on, what do you have to clean, how do you have to quarantine things, what do you have to do, this is for libraries. They are specifically researching library materials, how long it lasts on them, policies from different libraries reopening. So keep an eye on that. They've done their first round of testing and determined that the longest that anything can survive on some materials, typical library circulated materials is three days. So minimum quarantine your stuff that's been returned for three days, so far you should be good. They're doing a second round of testing on some more materials. So keep an eye on them if you're a library and want to know for me, for a library, what I should be knowing and paying attention to. All right, so I just want to make sure that everyone knows that information is out there. If you are not a Nebraska library, feel free to look at our resources like I said, they're some of them are for anybody. But also check in with your own state library or your state library association, they may be off providing the same kind of resources and information for you in your location. So let's get into today's Encompass Live show. We're all here for the taming of the site helping users to find what they need, where they expect it. I'm going to hand over presenter control to you, Jessica, as we get your slides up while I do this. There we go, you should see the little pop up, come up. Okay, yep, there we go. There we go. Get your slides in my way. There we go. All right, so with us this morning is Jessica Gilbert-Rebman and she is from University of North Dakota. And she's going to talk to us this morning about taking, getting your website to be usable, I guess to be the general thing. If you guys have been attending the show for the last couple of months, you know that I've been bringing on some of my speakers, many of my speakers have been from the Library Technology conference that was to be held in, say, Pal, Minnesota back in March. But that was when all of the COVID-19 pandemic really started blowing up and it was canceled. Both myself and Jessica, we're supposed to present there. And I've been bringing on some of those presenters here on our show. So hopefully we can get the information out. So I'm really glad to have Ghibli get you on the show to share this. Yeah, thank you. I must take it away. Sorry. No, that's okay. Go ahead. I was going to say that we're hoping to still have the Lib Tech conference virtually sometime. We're just trying to figure out how that might work. So maybe we'll present, you know, some version of these again in the future. When you're, something you haven't done as a standard, it is hard to totally switch gears to something like that. I know some conferences have been able to like ALA and PLA did virtual versions, but it's not necessarily the full conference, you know, a selected, selected presentations kind of thing. Yeah, it's kind of interesting because ALA, I went to the ALA virtual and a lot of theirs were recorded. So that wasn't what I was really expecting either. Yeah, they had times for them, but they had been pre-recorded. So it was really interesting to go in and some of them did have like the panelists or their presenters there that could ask, answer questions at the end. But it wasn't, a lot of people were like, oh, this is recorded. I'll just go to a live one instead. So I feel like, yeah, it was just an interesting concept. Yeah, well, so we'll let it keep you informed on what's going on with it, definitely. So let's talk about chaining our site. Okay, so as Chris said, I am Jessica Gilbert-Redmond. I live in Grand Forks, North Dakota. And I was previously the Web Services Librarian at the main campus library at the University of North Dakota. And that's kind of the timeframe I'm going to talk to you about here, where we had to, it seemed quite sudden, overhaul our entire site. But it actually was about a year and a half of work, maybe about two years where we, the university as a whole had decided to go ahead and overhaul the entire university site. And we are part of that, and we follow under their guidelines. So we needed to update as well. And I was fairly new when this kind of came in. I was there for a little over three years. And I took this as an opportunity to really start digging in and thinking about the user more. A lot of the site was built as kind of the internet grew. And so it was an interesting project to look at how it grew sort of organically. And then trying to see what we could do with it to make it less, let's say, tangled. So I don't know how many of you here are dealing with a legacy site, or maybe it's just one that you think needs to be updated, or whatever your reason for being here. There's going to be a little bit of something for, I think, everybody to take away and take back to their site. And I did inherit an overgrown legacy site where, as I said, it grew over time. And normally that's not so bad until you're 10 years in and you look back and you realize that nothing was really created with information architecture in mind. Or it was kind of like, we need this page. And the person who was the web services librarian at the time would just create that page. And sometimes it would end up a top level page. Sometimes it kind of fits somewhere else. So this was a chance to step back and to really look at everything that we had on our site. I've had the experience, too, in my past, not even having a web services librarian who's in charge of the entire thing, but just individual staff members saying, I need a page for my thing. Can I make one? Sure, make one. See their own thing. And then so then you've got like 10 different designs and 10 different setups, all linking from the main one, because they said, yes, sure, make your own page about your project, your research, your lib guide, whatever. And then it just become, because there was no one person. Yeah. And ours was one person, but it's really interesting when, because you say that, and that's kind of what happened, people would say, I want this, I want this, but our university is very controlling about who has access to make those changes. And that may be the case at other universities. But so it would just be like, that person would say, oh, okay, I'll create this page. And, you know, people want their page up now. So I think that was part of it is, there wasn't a lot of time, it was like, oh, gosh, this thing is happening. We need this information. Or this is new. We need a page for that. That happened a lot when I, you know, the first year that I was there, people would just be like, oh, I have an idea. This should be on our website. And then, you know, when I would try to go, okay, we have to think about where does it live? How do people get there? They were just like, we'll just take it on the homepage, which we are going to talk about in a little bit. So one thing that I am talking to other people who have kind of been in this process where either you have so many cooks in the kitchen working on the webpage, like Christa said, or it's just kind of grown organically and you don't know necessarily how things, or why things are the way they are. There are some symptoms. If users are getting lost and they're confused, and they don't know where to go. And a lot of times, I don't know if you guys see this, but I would see it on the reference desk, because I was also a part-time reference librarian. They would come up and they would say, I was looking for something and I couldn't find it. And I knew it was on the webpage because, you know, it's my job to be on the website. But they just, it just was not intuitive. It wasn't easy to get them there. So it was increasing our time. It was increasing the time of the reference librarians, of the front desk staff. And then sometimes, you know, if information is outdated, then it would be like, who changes this? Who do I go to? And then, so a student would tell whoever they knew or saw, or send an email to the general and then it had to route its way. So outdated information. Also, if there is any, and oh, I keep doing this. Sorry, guys. It's all good. Because I'm trying to, there we go. Oh, now it's just right in my face. Get rid of that little guy. Okay. So they tend to come in and get ratted around and it takes more of their time and it's taking more of our time. Or the information just isn't helpful. It's, there are times where I can't find the information and you know it's there, but it's on this page that's, you know, a big block of text and students and patrons, I mean, just generally anybody, nobody is going to a webpage to read a huge block of text when they want some information. They want it to be little bite-sized chunks. They want it to be scannable, digestible, you know, things like that. Then the other thing is more that you can see yourself as well. Not just in users, but as you're navigating the page or as staff and users are navigating the page, are there broken links? Do you constantly find things that, I know I came in and I'd be like, there's a link here. It doesn't go anywhere. And they'd say, oh, that used to go to, but we don't do that anymore. Or we updated it and now it's this or we use a different service. And the same thing with acronyms and jargon. That's something that I run into a lot where people, let's say you upgraded to something like, you know, a new library system. And they're still calling it the old name from three systems ago, because that's what people got used to saying. And it's a completely different company and a completely different software. So that kind of stuff, broken links, information is a little, what is this thing talking about? I call these ghost pages. These are pages in your content management system that don't appear. That happened with us. So originally when the site was overhauled in 2009 to the new page that I was dealing with or the new site I was dealing with or old site I was dealing with, they were doing an audience-based system. So they had sections that were for like, here's where students go, here's where faculty go, here's where researchers, it was kind of broken out. And at that time, the way that the CMS worked, they had to create three different, so like if there was a form that all three could fill out, say to recommend a book that the library by, they would make three of those. And one would be linked in the student section, one would be linked the faculty section, one would be linked in the grad student slash researcher section. And so there were times where I'd look and one page now went to what used to be the faculty one and one page went to what used to be the student one. And maybe in the interim, in the third one is just either still there or was deleted. And in the interim, only one was updated. And so now we have two forms that are findable and out there or two pages, they have different information and should be the same. And so that's another way, duplicates ones that just aren't out there, but are findable on Google, as I'm sure some of you may find out, where someone suddenly emails you out of the blue and says, oh, I have this information that would be perfect for this page, you know, those little spam emails we get, or here's some information that I think is outdated on your site and you realize that page is linked nowhere. It's just a ghost page that is hanging out, but Google is finding it. And then also with your navigation. So anything that is confusing to get from point A to point B. So sometimes I've seen where people have three or four menus on a page, or there's just so many links or so many ways to get to something, or to leave a page, or, you know, that they just shut down, there's just too many ways for them to go on a page. So it's also important to make that information clear and helpful to them. I'm going to have a few of these little kind of fun quotes, because I think they're really helpful in kind of framing what you're doing. So this content is a hairy, complicated beast by Aaron Cassane, and that elements of content strategy is a really, really good book. Content is informed by so many different things and so many different people. And we're going to talk about three main things with your information architecture, with your navigation, and then the actual content on the page that people are trying to get to. And each one of those things has probably a little bit of politics involved in it, campus politics, sometimes potentially, you know, public libraries, actual politics. There are so many stakeholders that it just becomes, it can become very overgrown. And that's why you need to, you know, keep it maintained. And this is not going to be one and done, unfortunately, it's kind of an ongoing process, ongoing process. But as you do this, if you do a lot of these steps and get things kind of in a manageable situation, you'll be able to keep it going from then on. It's not going to be as onerous. It's not going to be like every two years you have to do this whole process, because once you have a set process, you're probably good to go as long as you keep your content up. And we're going to talk about that as well. So we're going to do a content audit. And this sounds a little overwhelming when I explain this to people, but when you're in the thick of it, it's, it isn't because there's a lot of stuff that you're just kind of, there's a lot of thinking happening in addition to the doing. And so some of the time you might be just sitting there staring at a spreadsheet. And that's part of your content audit, because you're really thinking about how the information works together. And there are three main reviews that we're going to go over. We're going to look at your backend information architecture that is in your CMS. And hopefully you have access to that or can get access to that, because it definitely is helpful to have your front end navigation, where you're going to walk through every page on your site, and the actual content on that of your of each page, where you're going to make a note of everything on every page. And it seems like a lot and the content one can bog you down. So it's important to keep in mind what your goals are in that section. The number one thing when I've said this to people who are doing this, if you are managing this project, and it can take a long time, like it doesn't have to be, I have to get this done in two months. So if you have time, you know, here and there to work on the information architecture piece, go ahead and do that. Don't be afraid to let it take time. But the reason that I say don't hand it off to somebody else, like in an academic library, I wouldn't hand it off to a student worker is someone needs to be able to see how everything fits together, and to know how the site is working. It's you're thinking about how everything is building on the previous piece. And if you just hand off this section to someone else, and you're just looking at a spreadsheet, you may miss something that you would have seen or would have noticed. So it is a common temptation. I honestly was tempted to do it myself. Sorry, wrong button. But I didn't. There's a couple other things that I want to make sure to say before we start moving into everything because this kind of confuses people is the difference between information architecture and your navigation. So information architecture is where you go into your content management system, and you can build an outline list of everything. It's it that is all it is. It is very methodical. It is almost mathematical, which is why a spreadsheet kind of works well in that you're just looking and going to the next thing. And I'll talk about what that looks like in just a second. Whereas your navigation is anything on your site that moves a user from point A to point B. How are they moving around? So it could be most people think of navigation as your menus, either at the top or your sidebar menus. And that isn't always the case. There are headers and footers that may have links, just the links in your content. Things like filters and facets where they can control how the information is sorted and moved around. These are all parts of your navigation. And one of the most important ones if your site has it is breadcrumbs. And that's where kind of your information architecture and your navigation overlap a lot. Because if you have a person in this section, and all of a sudden the breadcrumb has them clear, you know, somewhere else, they can sometimes get confused on how to get back to where they were. It's not as bad with I feel like students, but some people are afraid of the back button. I'm not quite sure why that would be. But it does happen. Okay. So we're going to start this off with mapping your information architecture. And this one always makes people, when I've talked to other people about it, this one's the one that scares them the most. And it shouldn't, because this is actually the easiest part of the whole process. If you have access to your content management system, there are some intimidating You know, it does sound intimidating information architecture as much as beyond me, isn't it? But I don't know. I feel like I know when I first started doing this, and I was like, Oh, no, I didn't learn about information. You know, so I did, I did read some books on it. I did, you know, look at articles that were talking about it. Because I was conflating that with navigation in my head, which is why I was talking about that. I just thought, Oh, that's how my site is organized. But it's literally the one to one organization of your site. It's so important to know what's going on in the back end, because that should inform it doesn't rule it, but it should inform your front end. And so something that you kind of know how things connect in some part of it. But don't realize this is what it is, what that it's the you know, it's a thing, you know the thing, you know it, but you don't realize this is what it is, and what you should be doing with it and can do with it. Yes. And I know when I started looking at mine in depth, because I, you know, I've been looking at it for about a year. So I thought I knew what was there. I thought I knew, you know, like I know, but when I sat down, I went, Oh my gosh, this is a mess. Because you know what you work with. And so that's where like, you know, those ghost pages and other stuff come in. Sometimes there's so much more there that you're like, where did this come from? Why is this still here? So and sometimes you don't have that historical person there. If you took over someone's position, and they left, or yes, if you're kind of starting out new on things, you may not have the historical reasons for stuff either. So you're kind of looking at it like very analytical of here is literally everything I have in my site, whether we're using it or not. Here it is. So the way that I did this is I just followed the directory structure in my CMS. And some content management systems will actually, you can export that kind of thing. And if you can do that, that is amazing. I would, export it and then go through each section just to make sure everything's there and so that you have it solidified in your mind. But the other thing that sometimes they don't do is this ID. So you want an ID that tells you the level you're on and gives that page a unique identifier. And then as you go down, and I'll have an image here in a second, you're going to kind of keep that identifier going. And you're not going to skip anything. Even if it's not being used. So you'll see on mine, we drilled down and we had just a whole folder of PDFs. So I listed those PDFs out. Let me go over and look at this. So this is my beautiful spreadsheet. This project is a lot of spreadsheet. I'm going to tell you that up front. I made my home level zero just to make it easier. I didn't have to do 1.1 for about the about section. And I went just alphabetical. So the literal structure I saw, and that's why you see this. I actually cut off some stuff here because you did not need to see the 20, 15 to 20 PDFs. But this one had a whole bunch of PDFs in it, for example. And so the first level is your top level directory. And I also kept the links. I haven't seen everybody do this, but this is something I did because sometimes I would get to a page and go, I don't even know what this page is. I don't think I've ever seen this page. And sometimes it was a ghost page, but I could easily get to it just while looking at my spreadsheet. She didn't have to go back into the CMS and preview it and all that. So I could get to that page very easily with the links over here. So I did, you know, your top level directories. These are the pages that are right under your home or the directories that are right under your home page. And then the next level under those top levels are access services, committees, and this one again as a directory. So that one drilled down again. And then with forms, it was a directory and drilled down again. We did not go beyond level five at this point. And some, there was a lot of, there's this idea that you shouldn't make anybody click more than three times to get to something, which is kind of an outdated look at websites. And it was based on a study that has since kind of been debunked, but people will click more than three times. And so you can have people drill down in an intuitive, natural fashion and they'll make sense and they're following a trail that makes sense to why they had to drill down that far. Sure. Oh yeah. And that's, that's where all this is coming in is you're trying to make everything make sense to somebody who's coming to your site for the first time because somebody who's using your site all the time, they're just going to get used to whatever you have and they're going to use that and they may even start to love it if they didn't love it at the beginning. And at this point, you're thinking, you're in the back of your mind, start thinking about grouping and what makes sense. We had 20 something top level directories or pages. So that was something that just seemed kind of overwhelming to me when I first went in there because I thought that's a lot of top level pages that people are not going to be able to find in a very structured navigation system. So as you're doing this, it can get, depending on how many levels down you go. And we do have more levels now than we had before because people are finding them intuitively and naturally. And user testing comes into this, we're not going to really talk about it today. But user testing is really helpful in so many, as you're getting toward the end of this to make sure that things are looking correct and make sense to your user. And excuse me, I'm going to take a drink here. My allergies have been a little nuts the past couple days. So you want to make sure that things are making sense to other people outside your staff and yourself. And that's something that I originally had built into this presentation. But when you're just looking at this process itself, it's such a large process that the UX part has to kind of be separate. So as you're doing this, start thinking about that, how would people put these groups together? And you're the experts on this, you're the experts on information. So you're working with it every day in different ways. So just think about how you would group things in a natural way. And it may not end up that way, but kind of have that in the back of your mind. And you know, like I said, it looks complicated, particularly I kept tripping on my IDs. So I love this line from Lisa Martin's Everyday Information Architecture, which is also another really good book. It'll come a day when you'll find yourself casually typing out 1.2.1.2.1.1.1. And at that moment, a fellow auditor somewhere in the universe will ring a tiny gong for you. And it might be me because you keep going and all of a sudden you're kind of like, wait, which level am I? Is this 0.0? 0.2? But it gets better. The longer you do it and the more that you're working on it, the more it makes sense in your head how the process goes. And that's why she said, one day you'll just casually start doing it because it works. And that came about halfway through my spreadsheet. I didn't have to stop and think about them all the time. Are there any questions about the information architecture before? Because I'm going to move on to my navigation. Yeah, if anybody does have any questions, nobody's typed anything in yet while you were talking, but that's okay. If you do have any questions or comments or anything that's just confusing or you want clarified, go ahead and type it into the questions section. I've got that open here on my screen. I can read it off. Or if you have any input or ideas, what have you done at your library? If you've not gone through this, let us know. Or if you're thinking about going through this, what specific questions you have, go ahead and type in whenever you think about it. Nothing so far. I can't think of people typing in the midst of it. I have to wait until they're done. So I'll see you. I'll let you know. I'll keep going and I just want to, if you have questions in the moment, go ahead and ask them because they may lead me in a little bit of a different direction, which is perfectly fine. So the next part is to map your navigation. And this one is, I said, oh, information architecture, mapping that, that's no problem. Because it's very orderly. This one isn't so much because when we consider that navigation is everything on your site that gets somebody somewhere else. That's a lot of things that could be happening. So I don't have a spreadsheet on how to do this because it kind of depends on how your brain works. I just went to each page and basically had things that were like, here are the links on this page. Here are some of the content on that page. Here is, you know, some of the information. Here's the menus that show up because our menus are a little weird too. Like, you'd be on one thing and you'd click on something in that menu and then all of a sudden a new menu would pop, a new side menu would pop up. It was very weird because our main university site did not have any type of side menus. They only had one basic type of top navigation type menu. And it was taken up with the university stuff. So we really didn't have an internal navigation system with our old site. And so that was kind of a homegrown thing. And it was a little clunky and did some weird things. But so as you're, you know, looking at this, just think about how you're going to be looking at the information in the future. Like, what information is important to you to know about how users are moving around your site? And again, you want to have level specific ideas for the pages so that you know where you were. And this is not your information architecture. This is your website. So if you're like me, where you're in one navigation menu and all of a sudden you're in another one, those ideas can get a little weird. So I had to get a little creative with my IDs. If your site is more streamlined and linear, that will not be as difficult for you. But I have a feeling that some people probably have sites like mine where it was just, you'd find yourself somewhere different. And you had to make notes of, okay, well, here it was at this level, but now it's in a completely different structure in this menu. And it's at this level. So I had sometimes two levels assigned to the same page and used the spreadsheet to combine cells for the information that was on that page, but then have like two IDs. It was very weird and very confusing, which is why I don't have an image of it, because nobody else would ever look at that and understand what I was doing. And yeah, you want to include all the link stuff. You want to include information like what does the breadcrumb look like if you have breadcrumbs on your site, the little navigation at the top, because you want to see how people are getting around your website. And the thing that you're doing here isn't looking at it like someone who works on the website or someone who uses the website regularly in your job. You want to come into it like a new user and, okay, I'm on this page, where can I go? And kind of think about movement from that page to other pages. And this is a little screenshot of what our old homepage looked like. And as you can tell, navigation is tricky. So we didn't have much, by the way, of options for navigation because of the university website. If you see that orange bar at the top, they did eventually give the option of, oh, you can kind of put a little navigation in there, but they had already created this kind of link list option at that point. So, and this originally started out as, this is where it was, okay, here's the undergraduates, here's faculty, here's graduate students. And then when they decided that the audience-based organization system for the website wasn't working, I shouldn't say for the website, for the front-end navigation wasn't working, they switched it to this, where it was research, services, and about the library. And this is where user testing comes in very handy, where you're kind of looking at things to see what people are clicking on, what they're using, what they're not using. We have 25 plus links here, there's 25 here. These top levels, where it says research services and about the library, are also links, but most people, even employees at some point told me they didn't even know that those were links, they thought they were only headings. So the number of people who clicked on these was very, very, very small. And that was hard to track at first, because this link and this link are technically the same link, the more link and the research link, for example. And so if they clicked on more, it was just like they had clicked on research. So it was a lot of looking at what people were clicking on and then talking to people to realize that they didn't know that. But you also want to think about, with your navigation, cognitive load, if you give people too many options, they are going to shut down. And sometimes they're not even going to spend the time looking, they're just going to go ask somebody or they're going to go, you know, they're not, they become overwhelmed with the information and they just can't comprehend how to move past this point. So like I said, we have over 25 links in site right now. And 25 in the navigation itself, not including the spotlight. So it's, it can be very difficult for people to kind of move around and find things. And that's the point where you're looking at it thinking, what do my users need from my navigation? And how can I easily get them to where they want to go without making them read tons and tons of information at the same time? You can do this, the content at the same time as your navigation review or right after. I did it at the same time because I was already literally on every page. So I would go through, you know, looking for all the navigation sections and links and everything like that. And then I had a separate spreadsheet that had more information about the content. So if links were missing, if things were misspelled, if things were confusing or filled with jargon, anything that as I was looking at that made me stop and think, how would a new user look at this? Or would this confuse somebody? Or is this wrong? Because it certainly can be. And this part is also time consuming because you want to look and figuratively touch every single page and the information. So you're not just kind of skimming, you're actually looking through things and saying, what does this content say? Is it in the best format? Is there another format that we can use? Or is it fine? Which does happen. I mean, you might have a lot of content that's going to continue to be usable and helpful. So you can see my, I just took the little section of my notes so you can see it. And this is just a few of them for the page. You want to keep them as clear as possible for yourself. Like if you understand what it means and you're going to understand what it means in a month, that's fine. And if you have to go back to the page and look at it to make that still fine. But as long as you know what that note means when you go to the page and look at it, it'll be helpful. But the thing that my number one tip is think about who your upcoming audience is going to be. Because as you can see, mine are a little bit irreverent. Like the one that's in red, who wrote this? This is helpful. Delete this page. Because there were pages that, I mean, I just didn't understand them at all. And even after talking to them, don't understand them. Or a faculty is going to think when they come across it, if they even do. Well, and there were times where I'd be like, I don't understand why this is even a web page. And somebody would be like, Oh, I think someone, you know, like eight years ago, wanted to do this project. And so they wanted the information out there to get the interest. And then it, you know, something happened. The budget happened, or that person left, or, you know, it just didn't happen for some reason. And so we had a lot of stuff like that that I was like, What is this? And I changed the name. There was there was nobody named Bob there. But sometimes you might have a lot of outdated pictures. So if you had a renovation, and you look at your pictures, and you're like, Oh, my gosh, that's from 15 years ago, which may be useful on if you're doing like a historical page or something, but not on, Hey, look at our beautiful study space. And it's 20 years old. It looks nothing like that anymore. So those are the little things you're looking for is anything is just kind of seems out of place. And if anybody else is going to look at it, you want to think about that as you write your notes, nobody else but me and maybe my the head of systems was going to see this. And we have a similar sense of humor and kind of feel the same way about the website. So it wasn't, you know, I knew that if he saw it, he wasn't going to be offended, even though he was the main person in charge of it before me, he was the web services librarian before me, because there were times where he was like, I just had to make a page. I don't know when things come up. And I said, I get it. And then yeah, I have on here again, consider if you think anything should be converted into a different method of relay. And by that, I mean, I don't know how many of you use research guides of some kind. But there was some information that, and like I said, my university is very particular about who has access to update the content. So we were looking at things that maybe needed to be updated very like pretty regularly. Every semester, every couple months, any kind of information like that that might make more sense to be in a research guide. We did so that the the staff members who were in charge of those could update them without going through the process. And the process was a lot of times, if it was small, to get a website update, it would just be coming to me and saying, hey, I need this changed. And I could say, okay, I'll add that to my list and get to it. But there were other things, someone came and said, hey, we want to add this donation page for X, Y and Z. And that's something that was not, I was not just going to randomly design and put up a donations page that had to go through levels within the library, within the university. And so that's where that comes in is, is there somewhere else that should live so that information can be updated as needed? And even if it does need to be on the website, like how does that, how do we do that so that things keep moving along? And people don't get really angry at you because you don't just change all the things when they say that. So you've done your information architecture, and you've got all of those steps, or all of those that list, you've looked at your navigation throughout your entire site. I know this might seem overwhelming, but again, it's not, please don't try to do this all in one month, unless this is literally the only thing you're doing in your entire life. Because this is, this is a very long term project. And you've looked at the content to see what's there. And now this is, for me, it was one of the fun parts where you're just kind of bringing everything together. You're comparing your pages to see in your, your content management system, what can we just delete? I mean, get it off your plate. If something isn't even being used and should not be used, I mean, I found things that weren't being linked anywhere and needed to be. And so, you know, make those notes and find a way to work on that with your navigation. But there were other things where I just found a whole bunch of things in our content management system that I could just delete. We didn't need that stuff anymore. Anything that was duplicated because, you know, we are now at the point where you don't have to have three pages and link to them from three separate places. You can have one page and link to them and use them in different ways. And we also have ways to create content and insert it into pages. You know, I don't know how many of you use like lib guides for your research guides, but, you know, you can map different sections and things like that. So, you don't have to have the same content three places and then only one place ever gets updated. You go to that one place and our content management system also has a thing like that, where you can create something and you can just drop it into whatever pages you need. And when it needs to be updated, you go one place, update it, and it populates all the pages, which is great for things like forms or even FAQs, different little things like that that might need to be in more than one place. So, kind of think about how it can be different if things are duplicated, why it's duplicated, and maybe in this day and age there's a better way to do it and your site structure. So, this is the time, and a lot of people are a little nervous about doing this, but you can change your information architecture and it should inform your navigation. So, there are things where, as you're kind of moving around, if you have, you know, on the webpage, if you have something that is, that is like a side navigation, I'm trying to think of ways that things that are built automatically, I guess you'd say. So, if you have something that something in your content management system is automatically creating based on your information architecture on the live side. So, for us, it was our side navigation on our webpage. And those things as they were being built, the information architecture did inform that. And so, we didn't want people all getting confused and being bumped around in all these different places. So, we ended up with only four top-level directories at the end of this. So, we went from like 20 something to four. And it was pulling, you know, pulling everything together in a drill down fashion. Like, if people are looking for their subject by grain, for example, what are they going to click on first? And again, you know, user testing comes in here. If you have a chance or you have the ability to do that, or even just research to see what other people have done with user testing. So, if you can look at and say, you know what, here's how navigation and like a side menu works best. And here's how your information architecture can inform that. Even the research, if you don't have the time or ability or whatever to do the user testing, research is super helpful. I highly recommend user testing, but the research can also help. And don't be afraid, like, you know, I could say, wow, don't be afraid to be really stringent in things, too, because sometimes you look at a page or your site and you're worried about offending people or you're worried about, you know, that's something I was wondering about. We had that, you know, who wrote this? Why is it even here? Delete it. Yes. And luckily, that was only me. I only saw that. But it is for exploring and, you know, evaluate an entire site with content that has been created by multiple people or departments. And how do you tell them, yeah, you did, you did a bad job or here, this is confusing or it didn't work. I will talk about that in a second because I went into this with, I went into this with like, because a lot of the content on our page was written by just a few people. And I have a trick for that. It's not really a trick because it's true, but I'll tell you about that in a second. So, yeah, if you need to prune stuff, and sometimes you need to flush stuff out, right? I mean, it's not just about pruning. Sometimes you have this page and you're like, this is not enough content. We get tons of questions about this. Why is this not on there? So you do need to have the need to know. But at this point, the nice to know, which a lot of people in libraries want to put everything out there because they want everybody to know what they know. But it's just not helpful to the user. And then consider other data. So one thing that I looked at pretty closely was analytic data to see where people were coming from, how they were getting to different pages, what were the most, what were the least visited. And that really helped with, I told you I was going to talk about the home page just a little bit and I'm going to talk about that right now. Your home page, everybody sees it as the front door. And everybody wants to put their advertisement on the front door so that everybody sees it. And so this quote from Steve Krug and Don't Make Me Think, everybody wants a piece of it. As a result, the home page is the waterfront property of the web. It's the most desirable real estate and there's a very limited supply. And this, in addition to the content, like Christia was saying, is delicate because people, everybody wants their link on the home page, which I think is how our home page became so full of links. And I'm not afraid to say no, but I'm also very polite about it. And the reason it's easy, I mean, it's easy to be polite when you have data. So I did a completely separate home page analysis. It's not necessarily necessary for everything else, but it made me look at the home page as a whole and how it evolved that way. So I looked at the home page as it had been from the last redesign. And I went to, I used the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive and looked at everything. I mean, I was going back month by month by month for the, you know, the 10 years that this site had been like this to see when changes happened that changed how users move around on the site. And so, and again, this isn't one of the required things, but it's something that you can do at any time. And once you do it, you know, you're up to date. You've done it for the iteration of this website. So I was able to see when we switched from the audience-driven to the topic-driven home page setup for the, for all of those links. And I was able to see, you know, that little spotlight section that was really like, it was a feed for our blog when that was set up. I could see when content changed and kind of think about how that worked and why that happened, why those changes were made. And it's, it's another step, but it really helped me think about the home page. And one thing that I did was I looked at every link on the home page that went to library content and did analytics on who was clicking on what. And we had some people who were like, this has to be on the home page. People are going there to find it. And I could say in most cases, they're not. They're getting to it from a Google search. They're getting to it because not everybody's coming in through your home page. They're coming in through the Google search. They were coming in through the main university search. So just having it on the site and having it findable in a natural, intuitive way was helpful. And so I was able to prune our home page in that way so that it was more informative and less of a cognitive load on users coming in. Yeah. So this is, like I said, it's kind of an extra step, but I didn't want to leave it out because everybody wants a piece of your home page. It is going to be the most hotly contested page on your site. And it's hard to say no to people, but sometimes you have to. And if you have data behind why you're saying that, it makes sense. I think your thing doesn't belong there. This is the scientific data. It's just numbers. It's not about you. It's not personal. Yes. And I was really lucky that we had all those links on the home page actually because I went, oh man, I can see who is coming in from the home page and going to these things because there are so many links there. I have so much data. But I still wouldn't recommend that type of navigation just for the cognitive load that it creates for users, new and seldom visitors. I guess I could say people who don't come to your site a lot because every time they come to that page, they have to reread all of those links. And that was something on the home page when I did user testing on the home page. And part of this is the observer effect, right? I'm watching them so they come in and they literally read all 25 links before they make a decision. And if I had done that, if I hadn't been watching them, I'm sure what would have happened is the student would have come in and they're like, this link looks good. And they would have clicked it. And then they're like, eh, this isn't the right thing. And they would hit back. And I actually had one student that was just perfect because she didn't, she acted like I wasn't even there, which is amazing. And she would be like, ah, whatever, click wrong. I mean, like she didn't even, I don't even know how she knew what was on that page. She made that split second. I looked at the page, hit back before it even registered what page she was on in my brain. You know, so that one was amazing. Yeah, that shows that that's some bravery. And they just click something that's not right. That's okay. You can find something else. Click, go back. It's all right. If you don't end up in the right place in the first time. And that's even being independent with, like you said, with you saying they're not having to help. And you can watch, look, it's working. Yeah. Yes. And that's, yeah, people were like, oh, I would go here. Okay, then what we do, I would go here. Oh, it's right there. You know, and when they didn't have to stop and think about like, oh my gosh, there's 25 links. I guess maybe I would try this one. And they kind of look at you, you know, I'm not here. Don't look at me. Okay, just do it. There's no wrong answer. Just trying to figure out the easiest answer. Yeah. So now I'm getting into what you were talking about, Christa, is, oh man, the data, the content is owned by somebody. And you, especially if you're like me and you're one person doing everything, that's just too much. And I don't know about you, but I'm not the expert on everything in a library. So, you know, I have my fields of expertise. And there are other people who have their fields. So who should be in charge of checking it? Start thinking about a schedule for maintaining it. So is it something that you can only do once a year? Is it something twice a year, once a quarter? What works for your group and the people that you have and your staffing levels, where you can go to these owners of the content and say, okay, can you look at your pages? Here you go. Let me know what needs to be updated. And then decide how those changes will work. So some people may want to set up a form and say, if there are changes put in this form, I can keep track of them and make them one by one. If they are able to make the changes themselves, that's another thing. Do they have access to it so that they can make those updates? But you want to have kind of a project manager role where you know when updates are being made, even if other people have that access, because you don't want the same thing to happen. You don't want it to just totally get out of control. And some people have told me that what they have done is they create a group of people whose job it is to decide what changes happen. So it just kind of depends on how big your group is, how big your library is. And for me, it was just me. So I was just like, uh, ask me, I guess, you know, because I was the only one with access. So this is, you know, going back to it now that you have in mind the owners, first, for the rest of it, you also need administration buy-in, which I hate that term buy-in, but you need to know that you have support for this kind of stuff, because now you're going to start going to people and saying, hey, I don't know this information, or I may know this information, but you're the expert in this information. So I was saying like, this is my little trick, that's not a trick. It's real. You tell them, you're the expert. Can we meet about this? And can we talk about the content on these pages? So I use my example about ILL. So when I met with our interlibrary loan staff, because there were some pages about like how to set up your account and our policies and our procedures. And of course, we had our policies page, which was all that can, you know, really dense legal type speak, but they wanted something that was more customer friendly. And I didn't blame them. I'm all about making things user friendly. And so I went to them and I said, hey, can we meet as a group here? We have two people in our interlibrary loan department. Can we meet and look at these pages? And we can start from scratch. We can update what's there, whatever you guys want to do, but you're the experts in this. And I need to know what questions you're being asked. You know, what content needs to be here. So, and they were kind of shocked because they were like, no one's ever asked us that before. So you may get that. You may get that. Sometimes administration just comes up with stuff and like, here you go. Or somebody else came up with it or something. But for this particular group, I was, I went, but I don't know everything you guys do. You know, I know how to get people registered and the things, but there are things that I can't answer because I'm not literally doing interlibrary loan all day. This is what they do, the experts in it. And it's kind of interesting to see them feel the ownership when they realize I am the expert in this. Oh my gosh, I can do this. I have a stake in this. And so they want to help more because they're feeling a little bit more valued, which they should be because they are the experts in this stuff. Give them ownership of their section. Sure. Oh, and some of the groups that had never been talked to, they just were kind of like, can I do this? Yes, we can do this. What are you imagining? Let's figure this out. Sometimes there are things you're like, I want fireworks and you're like, well, maybe not fireworks. But don't be afraid to start from scratch. So that's, you know, with ILL, we had some stuff, but eventually we just sat down and were like, what content do you think is important? And then we outlined what should be on there, and then they wrote stuff out, sent it off to the head of their department to get feedback, made some changes, sent it to me. We met again to talk about what it would look like. And so I wanted them to be the content experts. Of course. Yeah. And again, if things can be put into different formats, kind of think about that. But before I met with them, so when I went to them, I said, hey, you guys are the experts. Can we meet about this? I just want to jump in for just a bit here. Yeah. So let everyone know we are a little after 11 o'clock central time. Sorry. No, that's good. Which is, you know, if you pay attention to what our page says, we go from 10 to 11. But we don't get cut off here at just because it hit 11 o'clock. We'll keep going as long as Jessica needs to get through all of her slides in her presentation. You're welcome to please do stick around. But you have to leave now because you only allotted an hour in your work day for this. That's fine. We are recording the show and you can watch the whole rest of the recording. Anything you miss later at your convenience. The recording will be available by the end of this week at the latest. And also the slides, I hadn't mentioned this or asked you about this, Jessica. We can provide links to the slides there. I know your Google years are on Google. You can give them the sharing link or a PDF of it, whatever. But so if you're not, you know, worried about seeing everything, those can be included in our archive page as well. And if you have any questions about it, just, and you can email me. I'm always happy to help, even as you're working through the process, if you have questions, you know, I've been there and people helped me along the way. So, you know, her email was read on that first slide. I saw so. And we're almost done. I only have a couple more things. So when you're meeting with these people and you say, can I meet with you? You're the experts and they're probably going to say yes. I sent this information to them ahead of time. So it doesn't have to be 800 questions or overly thinking about what the content is. I just wanted them to think about what they wanted. So I sent them these four questions for them to, if it was a group of people, meet and talk about and kind of write their thoughts down. If it was just one person, the same thing, think about them, write their thoughts down so that when we meet they have an idea and then we went over them. So here are the four things. What are we trying to achieve with this content? Why do we even need to do this? The number one question, are we just creating it because it's cool? Or are we creating it because there is some content that people need? And what do our users want and need from our content? So we need to think about that just enough information idea here where you can list everything you think they want and need and then start kind of distilling it down into this is what they have to know. And then how will we measure the success of our content? That one, someone was like, how do we do that? I'm like, for ILL, I said, do you get a lot of questions that we're going to answer now? And they said, yeah. And they said, if you stop getting as many questions, I think that's one measure of our success is now that there's an FAQ that is easily findable and tells them all these things. Does that mean that's a measure of success that it's findable? You can look at analytics. So I mean, just kind of think outside the box of what success looks like. It's not just that, oh, it delivers what we need. It's something that's measurable over time. And then what can we do with our available time talent and budget resources? And this is one that often does not get asked and way too often does not actually get considered when people are trying to make content is what can we do? So I know at one point someone said, hey, what if we made tutorials for all of these things? And I was like, what kind of tutorials? And they were like, oh, videos. And so we sat down and we started looking at it. And I was like, okay, here are the things that we need as far as time talent and budget, we need time to make the video, time to edit the video for the content, time to caption the video, because we do not have anyone on our campus who provides captioning. If we do that, we have to go with a third party and pay for it. So we tend to do all of our own captioning. And that's something I am adamant about, because it's a user experience need to have captions on there. I mean, it's legal, but even if it weren't a legal requirement, you shouldn't have them anyway. And the other thing with videos is things become quickly outdated, particularly with tutorials. So like if you change the page, if the vendor changes the page, whatever happens with that tutorial, so how often are you going to be able to redo this if necessary? You can't put a video on your website. And depending on what it is, but automatically assume that that tutorial video is going to work a year from now. So think about that with time, talent and budget. Do you have time to maintain this content in addition to creating the content? And then, again, we were talking about revisit your content. So make that plan of how often you're going to go back to the experts and say, hey, can you look at this? Have you noticed anything that needs to be added, removed, updated, revised? Just keep it going. Once you have done all of this work, right, you know, you've done months of work to get this site updated and the content going and things intuitive for your visitors, you don't want to let it lapse again. And it's easier now because literally all you have to do is think about, you know, hey, we have new content. Okay, where should it logically go? Where should it live? How are users going to find it? So you do it on a per thing basis as you get new things. But also your content on pages that are older are just going to be updated every so often. Does anybody have questions? Comments? Yes, okay, anybody have any questions or if you want to know more about or something you're curious about that hasn't been mentioned yet, get it into the question section of your go to webinar section that session interface and we can get that asked and answered for you. Nobody had any questions during assuming like me, they're really just paying attention to a lot of this good information of, you know, I think, like you said, the being just rethinking how you approach your website. There's and I hope I didn't overwhelm everybody with everything because I mean, you could have a whole class on information architecture, right, and how that works. But it is a lot of stealing a website. Just take it at the base level and take it step by step. It'll take like you said, I think something that a lot of people don't realize it may take months and months and other people definitely if you have other people in your staff that can help with this. It's not just a let's do up a new website in the next few weeks. No, it's a long term project that you'll do while you're doing other things too. So and that's okay, it's a slow work your way through it. Don't become overwhelmed because it once you do start looking at it and seeing what is every that like the spreadsheet of what is this while you're here? Who put this here? What is it not go anywhere anymore? Yeah. And maybe you're nicer than me and you don't write, you know, sarcastic comments. Have your own notes page and then the public notes page, the public notes page. Yeah, get your, get your, urge what you really want to say out, kind of like the write a letter to somebody you're annoyed at but don't actually mail it. Yeah, where you type it out and then you hit delete. Exactly. And it's so funny because when I first started this process, I, I was, I was so overwhelmed with, like, I was looking at it so broadly. And then when I started thinking about, okay, how can I break this down, which is where this is coming from? Oh, these are, these are little steps, like this step is going to be easier, the step's going to take time. Can I combine these steps, you know, different things in my brain of how does it work for me? How am I going to view the information afterwards? And I think that made it less overwhelming because it, I don't have to do it like someone else did. And you guys don't have to do particularly like the content and the navigation audit type stuff. You don't have to do it the way I did, because your brain may work a little bit differently. Figure out your own way to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Figure out a method that works. And there are so many out there when you start looking at content audits or navigation audits and things like that. There's something called the navigation stress test, if anybody's interested in it, where it just has you go to your page and you do this, you do these things to figure out how people are getting around on that page that really made me look at navigation a different way. So, I mean, just different little things like that that you find in your research that really are helpful. And there's lots of amazing content out there. Oh, there's so much information. So much information out there. Don't be too overwhelmed by it. I just don't look like anybody has any desperate questions right now. And that's fine. You can reach out to Jessica. Like I said, her email is on that first slide. And we will have the slides available to you when the archive is ready. I'm going to pull back, present your control to my screen then, so we can wrap things up here. So, as I said, yes, we are recording and the recording will be available by the end of this week at the latest, as long as GoToWebinar and YouTube cooperate with me. And I'll show you, here's our main Encompass Live page. All of our archive, everyone who attended today and everyone who registered for today's show, get an email from me letting you know when the archive is ready. You will also push it out onto our various social media. We have mailing lists here in Nebraska, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook. But this is where all of our archives go, so you can always check here to see if the archive is ready. Here's last week's show. There's usually a link to the recording and a link to the presentation. Same thing will be there, the most recent one at the top of the list. So today's show will end up there. While we're here, I'll talk about our archives. You can see we do have a search feature, so you can search the entire history of our show here. You can search the full archives or the most recent 12 months. And that is because this is our full archives. Encompass Live premiered in January 2009, so we do have over 10 years worth of recordings here. And I know Jessica was just mentioning about videos become outdated. Yes, however, depending on the situation with us being librarians and we do save historical things, that's what we have here. Everything is dated though, so as I'm not going to scroll all the way down here, but you'll see there is always a date for the original broadcast of the show. So just pay attention to that when you're going through our archives and watching something. Some of our topics will stand the test of time, reading lists, you know, things like that. But some things may become outdated, some services or products may no longer exist or may have changed significantly, links to different things may no longer work, and that's fine. Like I said, this is our archive, it's historical, just pay attention to the broadcast date. But if you do want something really recent, just only search the most recent 12 months if you really want something totally up to date from there. As I mentioned, we do have a, we have our Encompass Live page here, and we have a link here to see we do a Facebook page. So we do update things on Facebook. This is a reminder here to log in to today's show. When our recordings are available, we post them on here. Let's scroll down a bit more. Here's when the last week's recording was available, when new shows are available. We post all that on here. So if you do like to use Facebook, you can go there. We also use, you can see here, we do have, and it just shows here, hashtag that we do use for elsewhere on social media, Twitter, Instagram, Encompass Live, see abbreviation, so you can look for that elsewhere to find when we post it about the show. So that will be where the archive will go. We do have, here's our upcoming schedule, and I will mention also a kind of a follow-up to this, yeah, a follow-up to this, this episode is going to come up on August 19th, when Jessica will be back with us to talk about drive-thru user testing, along with her colleague, Kalisha. Kalisha, yes, is that right? Yes, yep. Christensen, who will be with her to talk about, now, so we talked about today about how to work on your site itself, and now you've got to do the user testing to make sure to see what, how people are actually using it. So come back next month and join Jessica for that show. It's not as scary as it sounds. On that, and then all our other shows that we have here. Next week we're talking about creating accessible materials for library instruction, but once a month we do a pre-sweep tech session. That's our technology innovation librarian, Amanda Sweet, does a session there, and we have a topic coming up about grants, specifically Nebraska grants for our small libraries. And so I'm always adding things to the schedule as we get things confirmed and set up. So do keep an eye on here as our August, more August, September, and into the fall dates get set up. Do keep an eye on our site and sign up and join us for any of our future shows. So thank you everybody for attending. Thank you for being here with me this morning, Jessica. This is great. I'm so glad we got you on the show. Thanks for having me. And I know I said I've been sort of involved sometimes in website design and not as in-depth as you have because as you've gone through this process. But I think a good thing is I understood what you're talking about, which is great. Thank you. I was like, am I going too fast? And there's too much information, but it's like, if I didn't need to be going into do this, I would obviously take this and, you know, go over it a couple of times, get the slides, you know, figure out what I'm doing, and then actually dive into my site to figure out, okay, how does this work in real life? Just to look at my site. You're not breaking anything in there, you're just checking it out before you do start making new pages. So this is awesome. Thank you so much. So that wraps up for today. Thank you everybody for attending and I hope to see you on a future episode of Encompass Live. Bye-bye. Bye.