 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. We do record the show as we are doing today, and then we post it to our website where you can watch it later at your convenience. And I will show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our show recordings. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think would be interested in any of the topics we have on Encompass Live. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries, so we are similar to your state library. So we provide services and training and programs and grants and resources to all types of libraries in the state. So we will have shows on Encompass Live for all types of libraries. Public, academic, K-12, corrections museums, archives, historical societies, all sorts of things. Really our only criteria is that something to do with libraries. Some cool services that libraries are offering resources and program we think they could use all sorts of things. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations that are about things, you know, more Nebraska centric or services and resources we are offering, but we also bring guest speakers as we have this morning. With me this morning is Virginia Kanoni, who is from the University of South Carolina Upstate. Good morning, Virginia. Good morning. Good morning. And this is a session that I saw that she presented at the Computers and Libraries conference, correct? Yes. That's where I saw it from. And I invited her to come on the show to talk to us about library websites are very important, I think, to libraries. You have a home on the internet. Social media is great, but it can't do everything you need, definitely. And sometimes we've done it here at the Library Commission, things need updating. So, Virginia, to talk to us about how they are doing that at their library, redesigning a library homepage. So I will hand it over to you. Okay. Tell us what you're all doing at your university. Okay, thanks for that. Welcome. When you were showing the map just a minute ago, I saw that there was no one from South Carolina. Oh, no, listed. And so that's great. So if you have anything to say, like, about the webinar or our time together, maybe nobody in South Carolina will find out about it. Yeah, so this will be the third time I've done this presentation. And my goal in every presentation that I give is hopefully for people to laugh along the way, because that's how we get through things. So, like you said, yes, my name is Virginia Canoni. And welcome to redesigning a library homepage. I have two screens going right now. This one is where my webcam is. And this one is where my presentation is. So if I go back and forth, that's what's up. I'm also hoping that my lights don't turn off. After 20 minutes, they turn off. So if you see me kind of moving, that's a little bit. That's what's going on. I am an associate librarian at University of South Carolina Upstate. This presentation is a glimpse into me losing my mind. During professional isolation, the COVID-19 pandemic, having a one year old while trying to work from home. During our time together, we will discuss many things, but mostly I'll provide an overview of several website redesigns, what collaborating with university communications can look like, and a resource list to get you started on your website design journey. You two can ask yourself, why did she commit to this project? Who allowed her to suffer and realize that if I can do it, literally anyone can. I know that I'm speaking from an academic standpoint here, but most all of this information can be translated to a small library. I'm in a small system campus library. We have about 6,000 students, a little under 150,000 physical volumes, and obviously a ton of online information as well, but that just gives you an idea of what type of library I'm coming from. So let's go ahead and discuss our goals for today. Okay, so we have three goals. We're going to discuss redesigning a library homepage, including the process of planning, building, implementing, assessing, and the unique relationship between our communications department and libraries. I'll provide a resource list at the end, including tutorials, free coding sites, and accessibility tools. This is best suited for attendees with zero to little coding experience, those with low budget for redesign and for small libraries. The session will be very visual as I'm a visual learner. If you're unable to see the screen, I hope that you can either zoom in or everything's working for you. I have a lot of screenshots. If you have questions, don't feel shy. I'll do my best to answer them at the end. And full disclosure, I'm not a computer programmer. I don't have all the answers, but I bet we could find someone who does have all of the answers. Maybe chat, UBT. So here's my background. While in high school, I, like many teens, spent hours modifying my Angel Fire blog using the inspect tool. This began my interest in coding. When I went to MLIS school, library school, as we often call it, I focused on research and reference and technology. Later, I was hired at USC Upstate in 2013 as a reference librarian, and I coordinated our social media at that time. To give you a breakdown of this session, we've discussed our goals, and I want to kind of show you where we'll be headed. So the first part will include a historical overview of my past website redesigns, conflicts between libraries and university communications, why we needed at that time to redesigns. The second part is how you can begin your own journey. And then the last portion will give you opportunities, pitfalls of our current redesign and our future plans. So let's jump right in. We have some project. So some project reasoning here. The reason why we decided to move forward with a redesign is because our library edu site was very disorganized. You could not find the library. It took so many clicks to get to the library. It was confusing. It was not mobile friendly. There is an abundance of duplicate information and on our library homepage, which was was and is separate from the edu site. It was difficult to find. It was disorganized again. There was no hierarchy. It's sometimes the links were free-floating. It prioritized our library eccentrities and preferences over user experience. Additionally, University Communications Department preferred not to redirect to the library site. So when you visit the university site, uscupstate.edu, you click library and it went to a sub page, even though we kept asking for it to just be a redirect to our library guide site. They said that this was because the main site crawled for main site pages. If a user looked for a library resource that was not listed on the main site, it would not appear. So that was the reasoning. Before jumping in, it may help to just think about these two sites in a way that I've got on the screen, the terminology. So library edu, that's our main site and it's hosted on our university. So uscupstate.edu backslash library. And then you have our library homepage, which is we have hosted through library guides, which I know plenty of libraries use that. But some people, I've also used her WordPress or Drupal or plenty of others that I don't understand that I'm not aware of. But for this presentation, consider library edu as our main site and library homepage as the one that's hosted through library guides. It just helps to consider that. All right, so now let's look at some historical screenshots of the library's web design to get an understanding of where we've come and where we are now. The main objective to showing these images is to demonstrate that the library who does not have a primary coder or a computer programmer within their staff may make drastic changes to improve the user experience and searchability of their site. If you're willing to take on a web redesign project. Okay, so 2004 this is the earliest version of the main site that I could find through the way back machine. Like I said, I began in 2013. So all the links on this left hand side right here, which I get it's sort of hazy, but bear with me. All the links are edu links. Many of these were actual pathfinders. So PDFs of lists of resources, seemingly every page or link was controlled here by the university. Then came a redesign. Then next one that I could find was in 2010. This was the beginning of our connection with spring share or library guides. Still, there's so much information on our homepage here. All the all the links that are on this site redirect to spring share. And I'd also like to mention on our main site here, we have a top hand nav link. So students, faculty, staff, community users, when they visit the page, they immediately see where the library is. All right, so 2014. This is the process of our first redesign one year after my higher date. I look to redesign our library homepage. I became the sole library content management system editor for our page, which meant that I had to modify the edu site and update it. I began the process. I sought to create a schema, even though I had no prior experience doing so. So I created this schema. I'm a visual learner as I mentioned before, but honestly, this is ridiculous. Basically, this is a whiteboard that I would have to say is at least maybe 32 inches high trifold the boxes and the lines are color coded. Each one of the boxes represents a sub page. So I looked at our edu site took every single tab link sub page and created this schema. And took lines to show its relationship to each different link sub page and how it all worked. So this is the web of our website. And honestly, this is how I felt after I created it. People would come to my office and they would see it and then this is what I would look like. But it's so accurate. That's how web pages work sometimes. I mean, it's not like it's not, you're not wrong. Right. Yes, I felt nuts. So, because of the schema, I made the following changes identified duplicate information. I consolidated similar information I deleted outdated floating orphan sub pages, continued to keep the large buttons on the right side. So I kept that more I put more information left hand side buttons. I changed the mass head photo from this one of our research desk reference desk to one of the students studying and I categorized by need. So there were some updates, some improvement, and I will mention, we still had a link at the top of the nav bar on the main site. So we were pretty happy with that change. In 2015, we created our first library homepage to hold all the redirected links. Prior to that, when you went to the main site, all the links are just free floating. And so in 2015, we created one page to hold all of the web pages on library guides, all of our resources in one place. At this point, we started lobbying for redirect on our edu site to communications, meaning when people would come to the main site, they would click library and it would take them to this page instead. We got zero traction on that. I'm still singing that song, even today. So 2016 rolls around. It's time for you guess it another redesign because why not. I included a giant video from our library tour, because that was all the rage in 2016. Do I regret this? Absolutely. The photo changed is very big. We categorized our hot buttons on the left hand side. That's kind of the quick links to give you about the library and then our resources. So there was two areas. I also mentioned at this time, this was one of the happiest times we've had with our website. It felt like we were really providing the information to our users in a way that they can navigate around the page really well. As you can see, our library guides homepage that held all of those links remain the same and did not change. All right, so the fall of 2017 looks like my pages have kind of gotten in different. So in 2018, the library experiences a redesign that we had no control over. So our university site went from looking like this to a big photo and all of the nav bar links changed at the top of the page. We did not know it was going to happen. The library lost their direct link on the top nav. After this time, we were located under academics. So the library experiences obviously, as you can imagine, a wealth of emotion in the wake of losing our top hand nav link. So not only this, our custom left hand navigation was not available anymore. So after the university redesigned took away our top hand nav link, our page here in 2018 was changed really without any input from us. So on the left hand side nav that you can see right here, this academics quick links was the same on every single page. We no longer had library and resources. We could not control that anymore. Things continued to get more confusing, although we got wise and removed the giant library tour video that I mentioned previously. The university communications decided to put a carousel on top. So this video here, this image here would move, which is not mobile friendly and also very confusing to the user. We tried to remedy the site confusion by placing a resource button that sent users to a sub pages. You can see the resource here. So when you click this, it would redirect you to this site where all of our resources are most important information were listed and our library homepage on library guides remain the same. So as you can see, I've already took you from 2004 to 2019. How many times have we redesigned over and over and over again 2019 comes around. I'm like, I've had it with this picture. We're going to get rid of it. So we removed it completely. We moved our links, our most important links to our front page. So instead of continually making people click through all the resources are listed there. The library homepage on library guides here, holding all those links, all those information pieces of information. It has not changed not one time. This is from when we began and what 29 2010 until now. Alright, so enter 2020. As you all know, or may not know the pandemic happened in 2020. Here's a picture of me and my daughter from 2020. She was born in 2019. The reason why I have this up here is because this is not only a website journey, but it's a personal journey for myself. As you can see, I got bangs. I searched for purpose. I was working from home. So I decided, let's let's get a new website. Let's do it. Yeah, so website reasoning, pandemic isolation. We also had an in a new incoming library Dean, and I wanted to have everything just perfect for when that person came. We were also migrating to a new shared library search platform. We had continued general confusion from our main site and our library site. And we needed more mobile accessibility. I know that's important to our students. A lot of times, they are researching on their phone, and they need to be able to have that information in a mobile friendly format. And we also wanted to imitate or look more like the university site. 2020 was a huge change. I mean, libraries and everybody had websites and things in the past, but when everyone needed better access online because of the pandemic, making them stay at home and needing access. Everybody had, I think, really dig deep and say, okay, we really need to make it work, not just kind of work and be okay or good enough. This is the only way that people can now get to us and get to information and, you know, for university, get their research done and get within, you know, previously, well, they'll just come in, it's okay, the website's fine. You know, it kind of serves its purpose, but when it was the only thing you got to get on that. Yeah, the students were struggling to find the information that they needed. All right, so in September of 2020, these are screenshots of our main site, our EDU site, and our library homepage. And behind the scenes, since June of 2020, I had began the process of planning for a redesign. So in between, I would say, 2018 and 2020, another person was in charge of this. And they put the icons on our main site. They made these nice buttons. There's a gigantic photo of at the top, along with a search bar here where they could search all of our materials from within this page. Did this work? Not really. People had problems understanding how to interact with the page. And again, our library homepage holding all of those links, all those resource links, nothing had changed there. And so it was my goal to make the library guides homepage and our main site seamlessly match, which was a lot for me to take on being at home. All right, so pre-project planning, instead of this time around, I actually made a plan. So I surveyed for the top popular sub pages. So by doing that, I surveyed our library. If we wouldn't have been in a pandemic environment, I would have tried to get that information from our students, maybe in a face-to-face environment. But I also checked the current analytics to see from the library standpoint what they felt was the priority, and then I checked the analytics. Did those match? And that helped marry our preferences with our actual users' needs. I mocked up our library homepage. I set a project timeline, paralleled with the hiring of our new library dean, and it was about a one-year process. And I continued to lobby for a redirect on our EDU site. Did not get it. All right, so here's the technology insight that I want to give you. If you're beginning a process like this yourself, I want you to consider two ways to begin. So the first one would be you can jump in. The pros of this are instant gratification. You can go ahead and start creating websites, progressing on your project, just jumping in, making web pages and using code that maybe you are not comfortable with. The cons of that is incredibly frustrating because you do not know what you are doing. The other option that you have is you can skill build before you jump in, get ready to build after learning without so many technology barriers. The cons are it takes time and restraint from getting ahead of yourself. For myself, I jumped in and I was really frustrated. I had some coding experience, but not enough. I needed to learn. It was kind of like jumping in with knitting. I often make that correlation. So with Bootstrap, HTML, CSS, style sheets, all of these things that make you a web designer, it's like reading a pattern for knitting. K1, purl one, knit one, over stitch. These are short hand that as you continue through, you learn, you pick it up. But for me, I've always just jumped in and so I understand why I was frustrated. The total time invested can't be quantified. I know that I told you my timeline was a year. I worked on this nonstop. I sought to build a library page that would need very little updating. So from June 2020 to July 2021 was my timeline. All right, my project process in action. I created a new website schema based off past experience and skill, but this time I wised up and I used Microsoft Word instead of a giant whiteboard. I sought out other libraries to imitate and copy, mostly since nobody from South Carolina is on this call, mostly Furman University is who I looked at. So that's Furman.edu. I inspected their code and I tried to copy it and I'll show you how to do that at the end. I mocked up a home page and I shopped it around for feedback. Ensured that our university branding cohesiveness would be achieved in the final design by inspecting their code, finding their hex codes, their color branding, imitating their structure, specifically their nav bar. I also prioritize accessibility, usability, and searchability, and also mobile, friendly, very important to me. So here is my 2020 schema. Looks nicer. Yes, I created it on Microsoft Word. You could also use Visio, B-I-Z-I-O, which is a Microsoft app. Instead of Word, I found using Word was just as easy. I color coded the top nav subpages and deep subpages. So if this were not a screenshot, you could click through and it would send you to each subpage and link. And this is how I felt after I completed it, which is a little better. It's a little better. It looks much prettier than the white board, I think, but it's still, yes. Still a lot. This is your first step in the process, is understanding what kind of information you have on your site, your existing site, duplicates, and cleaning it up. You've got to clean up your space before you can redesign it. And you mentioned that earlier. I think that a lot of people don't realize, and I'm sure we have that issue here, those orphan pages and the ones that you didn't realize were still out there doing something. Absolutely. The ones that you created, who knows when, way before your time, and then someone comes upon it by accident. You're like, we have a page that does what? Now? Why? No, no, no. I also mentioned free-floating PDFs. Checking your assets and looking at your content that is just floating around. Okay, so here's another technology insight. So imitation is a sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness. Now Oscar Wilde said that. So as I mentioned, I relied heavily on imitating Furman University's library pages. Many things I could not create, but some I could. So using the inspect tool helps a ton when you're looking at someone's site that you find beautiful that you want to use. You could also consider finding out who does code for them, reaching out to them, asking them for help. Sometimes they'll offer you help. And be sure to find and interweave any branding that your library would like for you to use in your design. This will help you with project acceptance because I want to mention, I might mention it later, it's difficult for people to make changes. This is a site that people use every single day. So not only do you have your people who work at the library who use in this site, but all of your patrons, your community users, people outside of your state. Getting project buy in, if you are able to show the cohesiveness and your priorities, it will help with project acceptance. All right, so here is my homepage mockup. I used, I think I use word to do this. So I modeled it after our university homepage. I offered a simplistic design, imitated other designated libraries. This was not our final agreed upon look, but it was something to get us started. All right, at this point, I started building our library homepage, but in a private area. So with library guides, you have a way to have a group of private web pages that are available to view, but are not out for the public. So using the schema mockup, the priority web page survey, I created a library guides homepage within the group section of library guides. This allowed for the pages to have specific style applied to them in one group, and they were private. I started the homepage, I built the nav bar, which was incredibly hard, because I did not know what I was doing. And I should have built my skill, but you know I built it along the way. And then I worked down into the sub pages. I used a site called code pin, which I'll demonstrate at the end of her time, as a outside code tester. Often the code you will build will collide with spring shares style sheet. So whatever software or web hosting site you're using, they have styles that are already preloaded a lot of the time. So using code pin allows you to test each piece of your code piece by piece and define the errors before you break your site. I have broken library guides so many times I've had to email them and ask them to fix it for me. It can be very difficult. So problem solving, you can Google questions, although sometimes you are not quite sure how to ask the question, which makes sense. Reading through forums, searching through library guides, lots of codes can be found on W3 schools documentation. If you don't remember literally anything I say in this whole thing, go look at W3 schools. Make a cheat sheet of repetitive questions and answers. So technology slides will also be available to you with all these links and everything in it with the recording of the archive of today's show. So don't worry about trying to scribble things down or wonder what are the links, what am I going to push out to you when the archives ready. All right, so technology insight for you here. Throughout planning, keep accessibility at the forefront of your design. Lighthouse is an extension that was suggested by our web developer to use for accessibility testing. I also connected with our disability services on campus and asked them for feedback from what I created. The two photos on the right show you the library's homepage and the library's edu site after accessibility testing through Lighthouse. And I will try to demonstrate that for you at the end. So I'm going to pause for a check in at this time in our project process. I paused and had a conversation with our university communications. And that's when you need to reach out to your constituent or to your communications department and try to get that face to face meeting with them if there's somebody else as stakeholder in this whole redesign. At this point, I would consider sharing your work, give a brief presentation, provide your proposed timeline and consider your tough questions. So for us, it was, will you please redirect the link from our edu site to our library guides link? If you won't do that, where will the link be? Do you have any feedback for me? What are your concerns about our redesign? All right, at that time I resumed our project process. I scheduled a soft launch for our library colleagues and interesting patrons for feedback. Open the survey for anonymous critique and get ready for those who resist change. You got to allow it. Set your date for final launch, stick to it, just rip the bad data. Move forward in your plan. All right, so I know this says current edu site and it is a current edu site, but I have like a twist at the end for this. This is our final project. This is a screenshot. So you can see that we removed the image. We removed the search box. We reimagined the icons. And although I didn't get a redirect link, we were able to get a button that targets out to our library homepage. This was a huge win for us. By having this button, our users can decide how they want to have their experience. So they can bookmark the edu site and use it or they could bookmark our library homepage and start using it individually. I also have links created within our narrative. This is searchable through our university site, which helps our users find where they need to go. I will mention too, we got an ask a librarian chat button on our edu site, and this is the first time ever. It prompts you for if you need help. All in all the users can interact in the in the way that they want to. I felt like this was a really big deal for us. So this is our main site, our current edu site. We launched our redesign of the library guides page. So when you click the homepage button, it sends you here. Overall, this site design follows our main page. They connect their cohesive. They look like they belong together. They're in the same family. The library search, as you'll remember, our library guides site did not change. For ever seven years, something like that. And so that site is now this. The library search is directly available at the top of the page along with our library hours and my library account. Lots of quick links that are listed here based upon the feedback that we got and our analytics. We have a library promotion picture and tons of information about what's going on in our library. Obviously, the search is the most important. So we have categories, articles, books, journals, archives and library guides easy to get around. Easy to search, easy to find what you might need. Creating that nav bar at the top was probably one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do. All right, so this is our present library homepage. Let me see. I know I have a. So the reason why that this looks different is because I don't X changed, and they would not allow for this really nice embedded code anymore from. Twitter thing there. Oh yeah. So, and no, so I had to redesign again. To show that that information is gone and subsequently we decided to delete our Twitter account for our library so we no longer have one. I created an accordion here. So the question. Image is a little bit larger than I would like it to be, but it is there and our quick links, everything else is still there. So, let's see what I have now regrets and hindsight. So, I wish that I would have started with W3 schools sooner. W3 schools can be paid you can have certificates through it. If you get a certificate through W3 it can show up on your LinkedIn, which is nice. You know, it's, it's about $90 a course, which is not nothing, but you can take a course and tutorials for free. So if you need a little motivation, you could pay for it or get your library possibly to spring for it for you. I think sometimes putting a little money to it can actually provide you the motivation to see it through. I wish I would have reviewed the library guides tutorials multiple times before breaking ground. I've tried to get a student survey out for it to get feedback. But in a pandemic environment was just really difficult. I'd also and this is really important for everybody who's on the call. I take a little bit of a gentler approach with myself and manage my expectations. Creating the top hand navigation was one of the most difficult things I've done and I was very super frustrated. But if you're like me, I'm in a small library or me, I wouldn't even say we have it's pretty small. And it was just me doing it on my own at home in the pandemic. And so if you're working on this alone, you're taking on this project yourself. Just understand that you're, you're taking on a monumental task and just be gentle with yourself. And if you can seek help from others, if they're in your library or outside of your library. All right, so here's my twist. Most recently, my university launched a new, a new site. And by most recently, I mean, November 9. It was last week. And this site is supposed to be mobile friendly enrollment services priority heavy facing for new students. And it was launched. As you can see, this is a screenshot, the site looks completely different from what I've shown you. Notably, the hover dropdown here prior to this, you would hover over it and it would drop down. And so that was gone. And the library was not under academics anymore. It was under another sub page. So it was academics, academic services and support. And then we were on that page. We have a new logo. And this nav bar is transparent here. And then it is not transparent here. So there's a lot of customization going on. Students, faculty and staff were supposed to be using the Spartan hub. This is a trend among universities where they have a very enrollment. And then there's a heavy front facing forward facing site. And then there's a intranet of sorts. So the site was turned on before it was ready. Surprise. The content migration lagged, and many sub pages did not appear. The launch ended last Friday when the site reverted back to the old design, but we got a glimpse of what is to come. And so, to be honest, I did my best to prepare Friday was pretty. It was an experience. So I did change. Is there better communication this time that this was coming? Or was it still a big surprise? We knew it was coming. We knew it was coming. We knew it was coming. So I have prepared for a lot of the information that maybe our students need, such as printing or resetting passwords. And I am now replicating that on our library site. So I've just been told literally moments ago that the new site should launch again, possibly in January. So for my future plans, this past fall, I'm now completing a website audit. And that audit includes our library staff to provide me anonymous feedback. I do not know who is giving me the feedback. I would say this is a really good idea for you to have anonymous ways for people to give you feedback. I'm almost done with a W three school bootstrap class. I would like to incorporate more accessibility within our life within our website. But these are some things that I am still working on. And with the new design coming forward, I'm going to continue to ask for a redirect. So it's time for me to demo just a couple of things. We'll open up for questions. If you have questions, get taken to the questions section. First thing I want to show you is Whitehouse.gov. If you have never used inspect option on your web browser, I'm using Google Chrome right now. So we're going to Whitehouse.gov. I am going to right click on a portion of the page that is not linkable. And I'm going to click inspect, which is way down at the bottom. By doing this, you're able to see all of the code that is creating this page. I hope that you can see this. And I know it's probably pretty small, but there is an arrow here. When you click that, it offers you the ability to hover over the different portions of the page. And so you are able to make changes. Like this is, they're now far up here. When I click it, it goes to where that code is. So right now I can change this to Virginia's best. When you click off of it, you can see it changed it to that. We can change another one here. Priorities, cats are priority, obviously. So we can change on the very far right-hand side, we can change the color of this. So it will take hex codes, but it will also take words, names of codes. So you can see I've changed this red. The reason why the Inspect is a great tool for you to use is because you can imagine what you might like it to look like. This is for simple changes. You can copy from other people's sites. So when I am clicking, let's say right here, this gigantic picture, we can see the code from it. The image width, where the source is coming from, all the alt code, which is good, and the information behind it. If I wanted to take this, I right-click on the code and I can cut, duplicate the element, copy, copy the element. So you can do this on every website, but guess what? When you reload this site, it's gone. We're not making actual permanent changes to the White House's website, no. Wouldn't that be something? All right, so the next one would be CodePen, which I relied heavily on. CodePen is a free site. You can use a subscribed version of it. What that does is it privates your code. So I am going to click start coding so you can see what this looks like. I'm going to drop in all of that code that I just took from the White House. And you can see in the HTML version, it puts it here and there is my picture. And the site and everything that they had is there. So something that's pretty interesting about CodePen that I sometimes forget to say is this dropdown right here will allow you to format the HTML so it makes it look as if it should. And then it'll analyze it, which is nice as well. So it says that there's no problems, which is really nice. If you forget a div, if you forget your ID, if you don't have a colon or whatever it might be, it will find that for you and tell you where the trouble is, which is really great. Alright, let's do the Lighthouse extension and then I'll be close to being done. So Lighthouse is an extension that you can download for free from Google. We can generate the report on the White House. So when you download the extension, it will appear in the inspect portion of the browser. Sometimes I feel like I'm speaking another language, but it will be there and then you can analyze the page. So I'll get it to run on White House and I haven't told that this is not the best tool, but it is the tool that was recommended to me from my communications department. So it is the one that I've been relying on. After the last time I did this, someone told me that it wasn't the best, but it is one of them. So you can see it's running almost there. So we get performance, accessibility, best practices, and search engine optimization. If you have problems, it will show you what it is. And then you can go in and make the changes and help it perform as it should. You know, if you don't have titles or attributes or for people to be getting around your site with a screen reader, that will become apparent through using Lighthouse. But does anyone who told you that Lighthouse isn't the best tell you what you should be using? They did not have from my best recollection in a way, a recommendation. All right, if I can come up with that all, I'll let you know. All right, so here's the cream of the crop W3. Definitely write this one down in your mind or on a piece of paper. They have excellent code for you to take and use and try. It's just like Codepin, except it's all available and ready for you. So this is the navigation bar. You can see this is what I have bookmarked. If I would have known about this, this is what I would have done from the beginning instead of trying to actually put together a navigation bar from scratch. So when you click Try It Yourself, you're able to work with all of this code, run it, make it look differently. Like I'm going to get rid of all of this stuff right here and run it and now it's all gone. Now I just have a nav bar. You could literally take all of that and put it on your page and use it. It's just already there. All right, I have five minutes left. I'm sorry, I did want to show those last couple of things. I can take any questions from anyone. Yeah, no, not a problem at all. We will go as long as it takes. We don't get cut off at the top of the hour just because you reached it. We'll go as long as it takes for everyone to ask their questions and if Virginia to answer all your questions and share anything else she wants to. You said you, I saw that last time you're up there you had some. Yeah, some resources. Yeah, let me get back to that. I mean, it does have any questions you want to ask get into the question sections at questions section now, and we will get those answered. And we do have a couple of them coming in a couple that came in. So we will start working on that. Got it. All right. All right, so someone wants to know, let's see here, I'm planning on performing a user experience focus group this spring. Do you have any experience with this or any brilliant suggestions? No pressure. User experience like a focus group for the students I assume asking your students. Yes, so the the hitch here was that I wasn't able to do that because we were in a pandemic environment. So we were all at home. Oftentimes I feel like when I'm teaching, I feel like I'm seeing the user experience in front of me. And so if you are teaching classes, and you are the person who's in charge of your redesign, you can see how people are are working around your live your library website. So I guess that's probably the number one thing that I could offer is, although you're going to run a user experience session. Whenever you're teaching, you're able to see it in real time. So I would consider that. I know that there's probably lots of literature written on how to conduct a user experience. I would offer them some kind of incentive. If you can, like gift card or candy or food or, you know, sometimes they won't even show up for that. So if you're in a class environment and students, one way that we considered it too is like extra credit. Oh, sure. Give them actual credit for participating. Yeah. That's a good tip. Yeah. I'm not doing the audit. How often do you, how often are you auditing staff about the website? I know you said you had done it at least once. And what type of questions did you ask or do you ask? Yes. So I just, I like this past week just finished my first audit of the website. And basically what I asked were, is the site navigation intuitive? Does it include all of the relevant sub pages? Is it organized efficiently? Does it is all the information correct? Is it readable? And then I offered a space for open comment. I feel like with these audits, a lot of times you need to keep it pretty brief. And so what I did in August is I scheduled out a one weekly email on Monday saying this is the page that we're going to audit. Form to audit it. You don't have to do this, but it would be super helpful if you can. And so the form is anonymous. And since I drafted for it to go out each week, I don't even have to think about it. I have been monitoring the responses. I also have some part timers that are, I supervise and I have asked them to do it. So although I've told everyone in the library it's not mandatory, I have asked those that I supervise to please help me. So hopefully that helps a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. So it looks like you're when you get the slides you actually have that little screenshot there so you can see what the questions were too. You had mentioned the ask a librarian link. Is that still somewhere that you said they had added that that ask a librarian. So on the new, when the new design dropped, the chat bubble was gone. Okay, because I wanted to know how does that actually work. How is that a live chat, you know, what are you using that work. It is so I'm going to open up. So if you visit live chat option now and I think it's great that we do it for the library. We have 24 7365 real person chat. So if 2am our students are asking us for help. We will help them. So navigating right now you hold over academics and then here we are in the new site. Okay, so here you come to our page you can see ask librarians right here. You click it, it opens up open chat ready to go. Okay, and this is a few live through library guides is a part of their. This is actually through library help H3 LP. Great, right. Yeah, okay. Yes, they, they staff for us after 10pm until we get here in the morning. That's going to be the next question so who's doing it in the middle of the night. They even have some librarians in England. So I mean our students love it. Yeah, absolutely. When the time with those time zones like right now if they're awake and we're sleeping that's great that they can be there to yeah. Absolutely. Cool. All right. So at the moment it's there but when this new site goes live again in January, maybe not. I'll have to start asking for it. Yeah, I, you know, honestly I tried to give them as much grace as I could, because I understand what it's like to be in that situation. A lot of this redesign it what was so important was helping everybody I work with, and who uses the website along in the process. You know, having their input helps them have project buy in. They understand why we have to do this. So if you can allow them to give you input it helps. I feel like with our university redesign. They need more of that. Yeah, and that's definitely key. Making sure everyone feels invested and has a say. Comfortable. Yeah. All right. All right, just, we're a little after 11 o'clock that's okay like I said we don't get caught off or anything we did start a couple of minutes late like make sure everything was logged in ready to go. That was all the questions we did have Virginia I have one more here that I'm going to answer myself in just a second here. Does anybody have any other questions for Virginia about her presentation about designing a library website. They said you'll have the archive recording and you'll have the slides available to you. I'm going to wrap up and I should have that by the end of the day tomorrow. Thank yous coming in so helpful this is a fantastic presentation. Nice. Thanks. Oh, very good. Yeah. All right, I am going to. Let's see. There you go. Okay. Yeah, I'm going to pull presenter control back to my screen here to do my wrap up and answer this last question that was on here too is actually a question for here at the library commission. So thank you so much for you know this was great. Lots of awesome resources information a lot of libraries are constantly need to read do the websites I'm sure thinking about it in the midst of it we've read on our library commission one multiple times since I've been here definitely. So new things and changes that you have to try and. So, so the other question that came in was from Tony wants to know does the nlc that's a Nebraska library commission still offer free website design services to create a first time library website absolutely yes we do. If you go into our search here it's called Nebraska libraries on the web. Which you might not know but. But websites for libraries, anything like that Nebraska libraries on the web project. Yes. There goes. Amanda sweet is our technology innovation librarian and she's in charge of this project. We host over 100 websites for public libraries for Nebraska libraries. So if you are a public library in the state, yes, we, this is all done on WordPress, which is what we use for our website as well. And it is free. Yes, so a reach out and if you need a new website and you don't have one. We have many, you know, small rural libraries who don't have the ability to do this themselves and we do it for you and no cost. So yes, we do have our Nebraska libraries on the web project, still going strong. So if you are wanting a website. And she's got resources and everything on here but go to the how to sign up and do it you may your library may already have a website through here too. So, we do have participating libraries there we go. We know I know that we've had some libraries who years ago someone may have set up a website through us for your library and staff changes new director new staff, don't realize that there is something already out there. So check here to see if your library has already been set up with one through us. And then if it is kind of dormant needs some work updating reach out to Amanda and she can get you back in touch with you know back into your site and working with it. If you're not participating yet just sign up, reach out and yes you can get a free website through the library commission. All right, so that will wrap it up for today's show. As I said the show is being recorded and it will be on our encompass live website. If you use your search engine of choice and just type in and compass live the name of our show. We're the only thing called the on the internet. You'll come up with our main page, which has our upcoming shows but also our archive page and link to our archives is right here underneath all of our upcoming shows. The most recent shows are the top so today's show will be up there should be done and posted by the end of the day tomorrow. Everyone who attended today's show and registered for today show will get an email from me letting you know when it's ready. Virginia will send me her slides or link to them and I will add that a few to the session page. Here's the one from last week a link to recording we put a recordings all up on our Nebraska library commissions YouTube channel, and then slides we link to wherever they are or host them ourselves either way but you have links to both of those. We have a search feature here so you can see if we've done a show on a particular topic, you can search and then watch the archive if you want to. We can search the full show archives or just the most recent 12 months if you want something just current. And that is because this is our full show archives and I'm going to scroll down not going to scroll all the way down because as you can see this giant page. This has our full show archives going back to an encompass live first premiered, which was in January 2009. So we're in our 15th year of the show. Oh my gosh. But everything has a date on it when it was first broadcast. So just pay attention to that date if you're watching an old show on many of the shows will be great they will stand the test of time so have good useful information, but things. Some things will become old and outdated resources and services may have changed drastically or no longer exist. People may work in a different library, a different place and when they first presented presented for us 10 years ago. So just be aware of what the date is on any show that you do watch in our archives. And this is something that we do here as librarians we keep things for historical purposes. And as long as we have somewhere that can host our, our videos which right now is our YouTube channel we will always have them out there and available for you. We also have a Facebook page over here. If you like to use Facebook, give us a like. We post notices reminders about logging into the show. When the recordings are available. So you can follow us there and we also use that of the little abbreviated hashtag and comp live for we post on to Twitter and Instagram that our social media people do. So you can keep track of what we're doing there as well. So that does wrap it up today. Thank you so much Virginia this was great. I think a lot of good resources. I hope a lot of people will look at their website and try and you know, we're kind of a little. Thanks for being with us yeah. I hope you'll join us next week when it is the first of our Sally Sally Snyder is our coordinator of children's new services and she has a trio of court of sessions she always does near the end of the year. And next week is the best new children's books of 2023 should be talking about new books that she came across this year. Then she will have on December 20 is the summer reading program for next year summer reading program 2024 ideas of books you can use for adventure begins at your library. And then on January 24 24 her best new teen reads of 2023 where also Dana Fontaine from our Fremont High School be joining her for that session. So these are three that Sally does at the end of the year and she's starting them up next week so if you've been waiting to see to hear about Sally's lists for children and teen books from this year and summer reading program titles you potentially could use for next year summer reading program, sign up for those and any of our other shows we have coming up we've got all this year booked up. And as you can see getting into January already. So thank you everybody for being us with us here this morning and hopefully we'll see you all on a future episode of income us live. Bye bye.