 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 shows 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 every week as we are doing today and then is available in our show archives for you to watch later at your convenience and I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our show 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 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 resources and grants and do all types of libraries in the state, so you'll find shows on Encompass Live for all types of libraries. Public, academic, K-12, corrections, museums, archives, really our only criteria is that it's something to do with libraries. Something cool libraries are doing, something we think they could be doing, we do book reviews, interviews, many training sessions, demos of services and products, all sorts of things. We have an Nebraska Library Commission staff that come on the show sometimes to do presentations for us about things we're doing here through the Commission, but we also bring on guest speakers and that's what we have with today. Joining us this morning is Laura Solomon. Good morning, Laura. Good morning. And she is with the Ohio Public Library Information Network and she is, this is a session that you did, oh, is this at Computers and Libraries? I forget where. Yes, this was at Computers and Libraries just this past spring. Yes, okay. There's so many great events and conferences that I can never remember where I see different things sometimes. And she's going to talk to us today about auditing our library website, something that is, I think everybody should do regularly just to make sure you're still bringing something useful out there. So I am going to turn off my camera for the presentation, but I am still here. There we go. So your slides are full screen now. And I'll let you take it away, Laura, and tell us all about how we can do this. Thanks, Christa. Hi, everyone. I'm coming to you today from just south of Cleveland, Ohio. And I understand your weather there is probably a lot like ours, which is to say not awesome. Two snow storms last week and more snow coming tomorrow, I believe. Okay. Well, you win the Not Fun Weather Award, for sure. We're not competing with that. Hey. Yeah. I'm lucky you, right? Well, that's why we're in here watching webinars, right? Yes. Yes. Stay inside, stay warm, and still learn. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So I've got a lot to cover in the time that we have today. So let me tell you a little bit first about where I'm coming from and where I've been and what I do just to give you some context for all of the things I'm about to throw at you. So the first thing is, what is an Oakland? It does stand for Ohio Public Library Information Network. In short, we are a state agency, probably much in the way that the Nebraska Library Commission is, although our scope is not nearly as large. We are specifically a tech agency. Our primary job is to provide broadband internet for all of the public libraries in Ohio. We also have some ancillary tech services that we provide. We also help purchase statewide research databases in conjunction with the academic and school libraries along with some LSTA money. And then like I said, we have these sort of adjunct tech services. For example, SMS notifications for patrons. We help with internet security and local networks that libraries have. And of course, when I'm here today, we also do web development for public library. When we say we, that is the agency, but the reality is that's mostly me. That is my job. So I currently do web development and related work for over 100 of the 251 public library systems in Ohio. So more than the third, which is way more than we expected. When we started doing this back in 2009, we expected to top out it maybe 10% of Ohio's public library systems. As you can tell, that we've way exceeded that. The demand is there. Oh yeah. So here's who I am in brief. So I've been doing this for a long time. I have been doing this since the days of GeoCities and before. For those of you who remember GeoCities. So I'm dating myself here for sure. I'm currently a worldwide web consortium certified front end developer. And perhaps most importantly, I have built a lot of websites folks. Easily 200 or more, I would say at least 150 of those are for public libraries. So all of that is to say that I have seen an awful lot when it comes to public library websites and just library websites in general, because I have been asked also to talk about school and academic sites, although that's not my focus. So it's very rare these days for someone to show me a site that scares me outright. Some I might giggle about a bit, but I also recognize that many libraries are not in a position to have the resources or the expertise to do development, which is why the demand in Ohio is so high. Because we do have some big metros like Columbus, Toledo, Cleveland, of course, where they either have in-house specialists doing this work or they outsource it to very large development companies. But for the most part, my job has been to work with small and medium sized public libraries. And so I have definitely seen a lot of things. And one of the things that I do also as again an adjunct to what I already do at Oakland is I also provide audits. So a library, any library in Ohio can ask me and say, hey, Laura, would you please take a look at our library's website and give us a written report? And so that is what I do. It's a free service that we provide to public libraries as part of our mission. So when I do an audit, I actually audit a lot more than this, but we have a limited amount of time today. So I can't even share all of the categories that I look at or all of the criteria, even in the categories that I am going to cover today. So I want you to think of this as maybe the highlight reel. These are the things that I think you should be looking at if you're just starting out especially. And so these are the things I'm going to cover. But this is not, at least for me, not the most formal thing I've ever done. And I actually appreciate engaging directly with folks. So if you have questions, comments, experiences, please put those into the chat. Don't feel like you're interrupting me at all. I'm pretty good at interrupting myself, reading the chat, putting myself back on track. I do it a lot. And so don't worry, I mean, you can ask at the end, obviously, but don't feel like you have to. Sometimes it's honestly either easier for me to derail the train while I've already at that station. So, you know, that's fine. And if you have commentary experiences, plunk those in as well. Yeah, type in the questions whenever you think of something. I'm watching it. We'll grab it as soon as we can. We don't want you to forget, you know, and that you wanted to ask about something or comment about something later. Do it when you're thinking about it and we'll keep an eye on it and we'll have a back and forth here, definitely conversation going. Perfect. Thank you. And also if you have, I keep saying the word experiences, but I mean that because sometimes the best way to learn is from other people besides the person who's yammering at you. So to speak for an hour. So if you have information that's valuable or experiences, put that into the chat too because it's always great to hear that from other people. So the very first thing I want us to be thinking about is speed. How fast is a site download? Now, I told you before that I've been doing this a long time since the late 90s and I can tell you back when I started and for some time after my main problem when it came to speed was 56k modems. So if you're thinking Laura's really old, you might not be wrong. We're experienced. That's right. Thank you. I am highly experienced. I'm going to say that from now on. So back in the day with 56k modems, which was about the best most consumers had at home, this was a huge concern. How fast does a site load? And then of course we got broadband internet. We got libraries, we got T1s at homes, we got ISDNs, we got all kinds of stuff and eventually now most of us are running on fiber. But the thing is that even in some homes, that's not realistic. Not everyone has still broadband internet at home or good broadband internet at home depending on where you live. And perhaps even most importantly, our home connection is not always the primary connection if we have one that we even use. So let's talk about this a little bit because speed matters a whole lot. Think about this. Companies like pretty much any website you could think of that sells something. Let's take Amazon because that's the mothership of selling things. These kinds of companies, when they take a look at how fast a site loads for the end user, they are working really hard. Their engineers spend a lot of time optimizing that site to shave milliseconds off of the download time. And the reason that they do this is because the longer people wait, the more likely they are to disappear and not buy something. The job of a commercial website is to get people from point A seeing a product to point B actually checking out with that product as fast as possible. So speed is tremendously, tremendously important. If you think it's not important for libraries, you're going to need to think again. We'll talk about that in a minute. So this hopefully does not surprise anyone at this point. Since 2015, less than one, well back in 2015, let's say less than one third of internet traffic was mobile. It's hard to imagine that now because since 2017, it's been increased by 75%. And now if you ask a lot of people how they primarily access the internet, I assure you it's not through desktop computer and it may not even be through a laptop. It's through mobile. For some home consumers, maybe a good number of them, I don't have that data. But for them, the primary mode of access is the phone or some kind of mobile device, which brings me back to remember how I told you I used to work with 56K modems. I always like to hold up a phone and say this is the new 56K modem because it is not as fast as your home connection. It's pretty good, depending on where you are at the moment. But it is still not as great as really good home internet. But all of that leads to this important tidbit of information. The average time it takes to fully load the average mobile web page is somewhere between 15 to 22 seconds. Chew on that for a second, hopefully not 15 to 22 of them, but think about that. That's a long time in internet time. But research from Google, which of course has access to pretty much all of the internet data in the world, has found that more than 50% of people will leave a mobile page if it takes longer than three seconds to load. If your site takes more than three seconds, more than half of your audience is already gone. And it doesn't matter if you're selling something or not. And if you think libraries are not selling anything, then you need to take a real hard look at your mission, which is to get people to use the library services. You're still selling. There is not money involved, but you are still very much in the act of selling. So it's really important that when we look at websites, that they load fast. Nobody wants to lose their audience. And if you think about your own tolerance for slow pages, just because you work in a library, I'm pretty sure it's not going to be a whole lot different than the average person who isn't in a library. So when we do audits, or when I do audits, or hopefully when you're about to do audits, there are two tools that I generally recommend. And the first one is called Gmetrics. And Gmetrics typically works on kind of a grading scale of like you would see on a report card. Although as you can see here, they include the letter E. In most American report cards, you have A, B, C, D. And then for some reason it goes straight to F. Gmetrics includes the E. This is actually, you can see this, this is almost a year ago, this is CNN. CNN's load time is not terrific, as you can see here, at least at this point. Notice that it does point out what the test server location is. So it might have been better if I was somehow able to access a server maybe closer to home. But if you've ever looked at CNN's website, you probably can guess why this is not very good, because there's a ton going on at any given moment on CNN, not to mention all of the ads and pop-ups, and it's just miserable sometimes. So this is one tool. The other tool that I suggest is, this is actually from Google. And I thought this was funny, because this is CNN and it failed outright through Google's tool, which is called PageSpeed, or some lighthouse is the other name sometimes that you'll hear for this. But the core web vitals are essentially the same idea, and you don't have to know anything about those right now, but those are the things you're typically trying to up when it comes to site speed. And you may not understand everything that comes back from these two tools. And by the way, I recommend you run both, because you will get slightly different results, and you can kind of come to a consensus about what's holding things up if you're having bottleneck problems. And you may not understand everything. You may already be looking at this going, Laura, I have no clue. That's okay. That's okay. It's worth your time to figure it out or to get someone professional to help you out. Slow down. Again, we're not trying to move milliseconds off of our load time, at least probably not. We're not Amazon, we're not eBay, etc., etc. But we still want our users to have a good experience. When it comes to knowing what things are slowing down the site, certainly those tools help. But there are generally six areas where slowdowns for libraries tend to happen. The first one almost always is the first and most likely culprit. And that is images. By far, one of the biggest concerns I see speed on library websites has to do with the content that's added. The biggest offenders are images. And that's because these often aren't optimized. I'm going to talk about how to do that in a few slides. So hold on to that thought. The other thing, one of the other things that I see, is too many HTTP or HTTPS these days requests. So that is a fancy way of saying how many calls is this site making to another mothership to get information? If you have some kind of widget, like let's say it's pulling your most recent Facebook post, that is not data that's living locally to your site. That is data that's living at Meta. And so your site has to go get it. A lot of vendor widgets like that show book cover, same thing. They're going out to maybe EBSCO or Novelist to get that information. Anything that's going anywhere else is basically making a call out saying, hey, I need data. And that slows the site down. This is another one that we'll see. And that is there's no caching being done. So for example, there's no server that is holding a copy of the pages of this website that can be served out because if it's cached, it's not rebuilding the site or the page every time. It can just say, hey, here's the version I had last time. Here you go. It hasn't changed. Compressing the code also. This is another thing. Some content management systems will do at least some of this natively, but it's not a guarantee. Again, anything you can squish is going to take load time off. So caching and compression are huge. This is another one that I'll see with content management systems. And don't think by the way that I'm getting down or ragging on content management systems because I'm not. We use actually Drupal. It's a development platform really more than a CMS, but we use it in much the same way as someone might use it as or use a CMS, a content management system. Regardless of what you're using, if you have too many plugins added in or too many modules added in, whatever it is, those little extras that you plug in there to do some kind of job, which is not a bad thing. The problem is when you have a lot of them, it's almost like you're going back to that problem in yellow. There are too many requests only now they're local requests because every time that page has to load, it's now got to check with all of those plugins or modules and say, hey, do I need to do anything here? Are you supposed to do anything here? That's adding more time. So if you have something on your site that you are not using anymore, take it off, uninstall it, you will probably shave at least a couple things there. Another problem is the server, the kind of server that your site is hosted on really does matter and I don't mean which company makes the server, but what that server is also hosting. Now if you're, even if it's inside your library, if you have your own local server, first of all, you've got to maintain that, which isn't fun for anybody as far as I'm concerned, but more importantly, if that server is sharing its resources with other things, they may be sucking bandwidth that you aren't even aware of. This is one of the reasons that there's a pricing difference for a lot of hosting companies. If you look at pricing, typically there is a quote unquote regular or hosted or shared version, which is basically it's like you living in an apartment building, you're sharing the hot water with everybody else and that's cheaper or there's a dedicated server where you're not sharing anything and you've got all the stuff, it's all yours, all the things. That's way more expensive, but it's also way more efficient for your site if you're the one who has the dedicated resources. Lastly, there's something called render blocking and you'll probably see this if you start running different kinds of checks on your site for speed and that is basically a fancy way of saying there's something in the way that is taking too long to load and so the rest of the site isn't loading. So for example, again, going back to that yellow square up there, it could be making a request somewhere else and so it's held up and it's not loading anything below that in the page or maybe there's some JavaScript there that's taking too long. So that's why all these parts and pieces have to be optimized because otherwise you end up with these bottlenecks and sometimes they're interconnected bottlenecks. Another thing to consider especially because we now know that mobile is extremely important, we have to also test separately for mobile devices and not even necessarily the speed but also how mobile friendly a site is. Now back in the day when mobile became a thing, I want to say around 2011 to 2013 maybe, I used to build separate mobile friendly sites. Remember way back, there might be a link on a site to say see the mobile version, that's long gone, but you still need to test your site to see if it is in fact mobile friendly and Google conveniently enough or Overlord and I say that only half jokingly provides a tool to do this because it actually when it comes to page ranking, Google prefers mobile and it prefers effective mobile. So this is another tool that you can use in addition, again this is not specifically for speed but it's an adjunct perhaps I use that word a lot today. You can see here I ran this with a local library here in Ohio, you can see here it got through the site just fine, it crawled it successfully but it did find a couple problems where the clickable elements are too close together. Remember people have to use their finger and not everybody has the same size finger and text is too small which is a common problem on websites that aren't really designed well for mobile. There we go. Okay, so let's move on to images which I mentioned before are a significant problem especially when it comes to speed but they also present other problems. So let's talk about why that is and what some of those problems might be. So when I'm doing an audit for a library yes obviously I'm testing for speed and like I said before a lot of the problems with speed can often be traced to images that haven't been optimized and I promise in a couple slides I'm going to get to that but their images they just they just took the raw version of it and slapped it up there and hoped it was all okay and chances are good it's not but there's some other reasons to be really careful about how you use images on your library's website. There's three of them that I encourage you to consider before you put up any image onto your site. The first one is money the second one is attention and the third one is purpose. So let me break this down a little bit. When I talk about money I am not talking about how much that image might have cost let's say you license it from shutter stock or dream time that's not what I mean here yet there's a cost to that usually it's not huge but that's not what I'm talking about because we're talking about the user experience here what is the end user not you going to going to have as a way what are they going to experience I'm just fumbling that completely now what is the end user going to experience and images play into that a lot. I think there is a tendency for libraries to throw up images because they think they look cool. One of the things that I have heard forever in libraries is we need an image to jazz XYZ up jazz it up with a picture. This is a problem for all kinds of reasons but this is just the first one. Remember how I said that lots of people are on mobile right probably like 75% or more it's certainly a majority. When you're on mobile not everyone has an unlimited data plan and even if they have an unlimited data plan rarely does unlimited these days actually mean unlimited you will typically get throttled at some point if you're downloading too much so especially if someone has a unlimited data plan that means that every time they download an image on their mobile device it's costing part of that plan to do it. Anytime you look at a picture you should be asking yourself if I had to pay by the megabyte or the gigabyte or whatever the kilobyte even what I want to what I literally pay for this to download it if the answer is no ditch it absolutely ditch it because if you remember if it's going to literally cost someone money it darn well better be worth it. I've been mentioning this a couple times so let me explain this now and that is compression so this is just one tool to do that this is just one of my favorites and by the way if you use something like photoshop or gimp or paint shop pro which are very robust graphic programs they have something like this already built in don't feel like you need to go get another tool but for those of us who are not using that kind of software or need another option this is terrific. So what you're looking at here is a screenshot from a tool called compressor.io and you can see here if you look at the big picture to the right there's a picture of the iguana and you can see on the side it says original this iguana picture started out at 700 kilobytes but then after it was compressed it was only 250 kilobytes according to their math that's a 64 file size compression so it's going to download much faster because it's been compressed the neat thing about image compression is that you can almost never tell that it's happened as it doesn't look like i see it's supposed to see like what the difference is i can't tell that's and that's the point now if you haven't pressed it down to you know 99 file compression you bet you're going to see a difference yes yes but but the fact that you can squish this down so much is amazing and actually one of the neat things about these kinds of tools when and just compressing in general is sometimes you'll actually make the photo look better because what's happening is with compression is there it's taking out pixels the human eye can't see like yeah you don't need this one you don't see it anyway so you actually get some more clarity oftentimes in the compressed version then you will have in the original version so if you are not already compressing your images optimizing your images this is the your first go to when it comes honestly to uh slowdowns this is where you should be starting especially because a lot of libraries have really big images like in their their carousels that i'll talk about in a few minutes um very very important stuff secondly images cost the user attention not just potentially money because it takes time even if it's milliseconds for someone to see an image and absorb what that image means what the context is and we and our users have limited attention that we can give to something when you use an image just to add visual interest you know when you jazz it up with a picture you're likely taking time away from something else it's important to remember that our users are task driven this is perhaps one of the most significant changes that i have seen since the very early days of the graphic internet because back then people browse the internet remember that you might have browsed the internet nobody browses the internet anymore you might scroll endlessly through instagram but i guarantee you you are not browsing the internet anymore there's just too much out there everybody is task driven that means people come to our websites because they want to do something find something or see something that means if you have an image that is not helping them to accomplish whatever that task is it's just an obstacle it's useless to them again is it worth somebody's attention is it worth somebody's money if you can't definitively say yes to both of those ditch it and that leads to this what is the purpose of this image too many things are just useless we think that it looks pretty and there there are some use cases i think where looks pretty can be argued for i'm not saying that every library should have a brutalist design site for those of you who are not familiar with brutalism it's basically think geocities without anything beeping or splashing or or anything i mean it's just bare bones website just just the text almost i'm not arguing for that i think there's a lot of problems with that too but you do have to remember that all of these images do have to have a reason for existing on your site they have to serve a purpose not just for you but for the end user along those lines clip art i you know i honestly thought that by this point in my life in 2024 that i would not be talking about clip art on library websites sadly here we are it's january 2024 and i'm still talking about it so these are meaningless and you might be thinking but laura we don't have any clip art on our website and i would say good job you you get a cigar good job for you i'm very happy about that you're not making me drink or cry that's always a bonus but there are too many websites for libraries that i have seen even recently i will not name any where they're using clip art and i understand that clip art is easy it's free it's not hard to get it doesn't cost anything like maybe some stock images might potentially have a cost but remember first of all mobile users may literally be paying for that clip art it doesn't have a purpose probably the most impactful thing that i can tell you about clip art is this and i've been saying this for years do you want institution represented by the same artwork that my son was using to jazz up his book reports in the third grade if the the answer should be no spoiler alert no you do not so it's time to put away the clip art and i know this is hard but if and if that means the difference between having an image and not having an image that's okay you don't have to have an image remember people are task driven you do not have to have pictures just to have pictures okay carousels let's talk about these if you didn't know what a carousel is i guarantee you you've seen them they're exactly what you're looking at here it's a big rotating banner usually on the home page and like it says there on the screen i'm about to get up on a big soapbox so get ready and i i'm going to apologize in advance my job here today is to convince you to never ever use these again and here's why and by the way there's a user experience drinking game for those of us involved in web work and this is one of one of the options there if someone says carousel drink and and you know so i joke about drinking i actually don't but i sure understand the impetus to want to uh and this is one of the reasons why so first of all from an accessibility stance which is something i actually do evaluate as well um but i can't talk about today carousels are they're awful i don't know any a good way a nice way to say that when it comes to an accessibility viewpoint these things are just terrible for people with disabilities it's very hard to make them accessible and i work very hard to make them as accessible as i can because i still have to build them because i can't necessarily convince every library i talk to not to have them it always amazes me that in a profession that uh professes to be about information libraries are really good about ignoring it when it comes to carousels because they see them and they think they're really cool and they're not and so one of the things that i share with them to hopefully convince them out of it is the data about how nobody wants these nobody nobody nobody nobody um only one percent of people actually click on a website slider and because many confuse them for ads you and i know they're not ads although kind of technically they are because they're promoting things for your library so people bypass them like whatever it's a big ad of the one percent of people who do click 89 of those click on only the first banner they see and that's it so they're not sticking around to see the other ones so the user uh ROI on this is absolutely miserable and that alone should be a reason for to get them off your website um i have kept this around for a really long time because it is so so true i understand that carousels are a political football in libraries uh because especially admins i'm going to blame the admins but it's not always admins um we'll say well you know this solves a bunch of political problems because we can you know you want this on the homepage and you want this on the homepage and there's not room for all this ta-da carousels because we can put all of that stuff in one space and it will just move it around well we already know why this is a bad idea so um but if you can't avoid them which is you know the story of my life um because i am forced to keep building them there's a few rules that you should use first uh there should be five or fewer and this is not my saying that this is nelson-norman group which is the largest think tank on the net they've been doing studies on user behavior for decades now they're pretty much the gold standard when it comes to studies about how people use the web um they have said if you can't get rid of a carousel five or fewer which makes total sense because if you have more than that uh people aren't sticking around to see it anyway right they only click on the first one if they click at all because only one percent even click optimize those images already talked about that these are especially big so you generally need to optimize them lastly and this is a hard sell i'll tell you because the main reason that i have found that libraries want these to begin with is because they look quote-unquote cool because they rotate they're animated which is funny because that's actually one of the main reasons people ignore them is because they rotate because they look like ads we have been trained as a society from very early on in the days of the internet to think that anything that moves is an ad and it's not any different for for carousel so if you can possibly avoid rotating them absolutely do so that's i know this is all a hard sell but i'm telling you um please please remove it they're so popular and they're like everywhere on the pages the sites that you think are the most you know the best and the most popular and the well most well used sites not even just library sites they're just so many places they are and but the nice thing is they're kind of on the downtrend that makes me very happy i'm hoping they die out entirely by the time that i retire i don't know that that will happen but i'm going to do my part to get them off of library sites if nothing else okay so navigation this is this is one we could spend a lot of time on but again highlight reel so i'm going to give you the important things for you to be thinking about when i started back in the day boy i feel like at this point i should just get out my walker and tell people to get the hell off my lawn but but i but i truly i start to feel like that when i said back in the day and back when i was doing these things so back in the time that i started doing this work there was actually recommendations about how many options should be in your main nav and for a long time i followed those not understanding or maybe not knowing like a lot of people that there wasn't actually data behind that the main recommendation that we would typically use was five to seven it turns out there actually is not any real magical number that was all made up but here's the thing well you might think that gives you free license to be oh we can add whatever we like and however many options we like to our main main navigation that's not really true because you have to be very weary here of something called cognitive overload which is just a fancy ux term for you're making people think too much and the more people have to think the more likely they are to not bother with you at all so you are gambling every time that you add an option that means that even though you might theoretically have the ability to put as many things as you want into the main navigation you do have to look at your use case and maybe skim that down as much as you can which seems almost counterintuitive because if you look at things like ebay and amazon it you know they've got tons of things but they're also a very different entity than a than any kind of library and they're they operate in a very different way so this is it used to be that people in libraries would say well amazon does it we should do this that is really not the case that's apples and oranges truly so be very careful about how many things take a look at your nav and say is there anything that we could get rid of or subsumed to something else as a child page of something else you know do do does this thing know history of the library really need to be at the top level of our navigation the answer is almost certainly no see what you can do to reorganize your nav so it is is more it's skimmed down trimmed down here is something this term mystery meet you've probably heard it before in relation to maybe your school cafeteria where you didn't know what it was you were eating and that is where this term or phrase originated but it actually came into widespread use in the web industry in the late 90s and author his name was vince flanders he stopped doing things around almost a decade ago but he wrote a couple of books he actually used this term to apply to things on a website where you would click it and not know what it is just like you would eat that meat in the cafeteria and not know what it is people don't like mystery meat navigation all of the examples i'm showing here like links and resources in bow or information these don't mean anything people want to know what they're going to get before they click just like you want to know what kind of meat you're going to be eating before you actually bite into it if you have something along these lines in your navigation you need to rework this and you need to think very hard about what it is you're actually offering people breadcrumb trails here's an example here this does originate with the whole idea of hansel and gretel and having a trail of breadcrumbs to help you find your way home that's exactly what this is and it is very much in use in websites and hopefully it is in yours this is a really important navigational piece that you should be aware of people will go as far as they need to into a website as deep down the rabbit hole as they need to go if they know where they are because breadcrumbs provide context about where a user is where they are in in the whole structure of your website and allows them to access other parts of that structure directly like you can see here each one of these is probably a link staff directory about us or at least about us and home so they can click on those directly they're not scared to be in the rabbit hole because they're signs telling them how to get out of it or to get to other parts of the site there are three other things about navigation that I would like you to think about when you're doing your audit and the first one is location and I don't mean the location of your library the location of your site I'm talking about location of elements within your site sometimes libraries think that they can be very creative and put things in non-standard places I hate to tell you this but there are actually pretty strict rules from a behavioral standpoint about where certain things belong on a website for example logo always a logo top left always always always unless you are an artist or photographer with a very artsy unique site and that that matches you know that tracks for that profession your logo should always be in the top left search should always be in the header there aren't exceptions to these that work well or work at all that these are just things that they go where they go and and I'll that's all I'll say about that redundancy this is something that dates back away also but I know it still exists I literally saw it two days ago on a library website so what I mean by redundancy is when you have a link in the main navigation at any level so if you have drop downs it could be anywhere in the navigation and then that link is repeated elsewhere on the site typically I would see this where let's say there's a link to history of the library up in the main nav somewhere maybe under about us and then that same link it could even be just about us is down in the footer some of those links get or even all of those links get repeated in the footer this is bad for all kinds of reasons first of all well really all of all it's bad from a usability perspective and it's bad for an accessibility people with a disability perspective because people regardless of how they're using the web with assistive tech or not don't understand why the link is in two places it's an outdated convention and why or why is it there we people can see it in both places this dates back to when people allegedly did not want to scroll on a website and so you would put things in two places because chances are they wouldn't see the other place you and I all we all know that people scroll if you people didn't scroll nobody would use Instagram okay people who scroll and yes on desktops for the few that are you looking at desktops we are used to scrolling it's a normal behavior the last thing I'll say here about navigation this is another thing that's spread by word of mouth for decades and there was no data behind it this has been debunked repeatedly and that is the three-click rule and if you have heard the three-click rule you hopefully you have but if you haven't the three-click rule basically states that people will not go further into a website more than three clicks from the homepage which is complete baloney it's been since the day this somehow was generated and especially because people don't always end up on a website when they come from say google on the homepage so how do you know your three clicks away nobody nobody does this nobody cares it's never been accurate so stop saying it there we go that's enough about that the location and the three this is things that we have like studies that prove all of this to where things need to be where people look on a page how people click through this isn't just like you know so I want people to know that you know this is based on you know actual research that's been done absolutely neilson norman group is really anyone's best friend who's who's wondering about how people use things or don't use things um you know that's I spend a lot of time looking at that stuff and they actually have they will email your your your that their newest findings to you also so I heartily recommend that as a resource okay let's talk about search this is our last thing today uh search is really really important uh if you don't have search on your library's website this is something that should have been fixed last week last year last decade this is this is really really important because search is often people's first resort and last resort some people will dig through your nav a lot of people won't so even if you have a really really well designed and organized main navigation people often will skip it and go straight to the site search also with libraries one of the main things that happens and maybe folks here can attest to this is that people will also think that the search searches the catalog which makes sense um that it's like oh there's a search box it's a library let me see if I can find my book so this leads to other issues that libraries have to contend with in as far as search so some libraries what they will do in trying to address this let me show you these two different things if you look to the bottom right you'll see here this was an example I pulled from a library trying to address this problem where they have a a search specifically for essentially for the catalog and another one for the website in theory this kind of makes sense except that this is this is actually a big no no because this increases that cognitive load as soon as you start making people think about which option best fits their use case you've lost them some people will go this far and be like oh website um there's a lot of text here for search also aside from that we don't want to give them more than one thing up on the upper left is an example uh it's one of our older sites at this point but it demonstrates a good way to deal this deal with this and you can see here that there's a drop down this is not particularly complex um where they can search for different things and it's all in one box and you can also see by the way we don't use the word catalog in this search feature it will often get put in the main navigation but believe it or not we don't use it in search whenever we can avoid it because data also says that library users don't always understand the word catalog which seems that blows my mind probably yours too but there's data to back that up library jargon that we use that's that's such that's an uh it's been an issue forever yep exactly some reason we just can't get out of it I think I don't know why we keep talking about it but people still keep using it right that's exactly right um Interlibrary Loan or ILS is is of course another one nobody knows what that is um there's all kinds of examples I'm sure that we could think of but we try to avoid the word catalog at least in search we still generally will include it in the main nav when we work with the library it's very hard to get away with uh not having it there uh research databases by the way there's a huge one we've all been struggling with that jargon for ages and uh there's no good replacement that I know of I've talked to librarians from all across the US and nobody seems to have a good replacement for this that lot that patrons really understand this is a more recent one um that Nielsen Norman found uh it's less than 10 years ago it was for us at least it was a fairly new bit of research and as soon as we became aware of it we immediately started removing this from our sites we had been using placeholders uh in all of our sites for some time because we thought they were helpful so what is a placeholder you can see it here circled in the red the idea is that it's some kind of text that is in your search field already with the intent that somebody will click there and typically that search text will go away and they can start typing their search what Nielsen Norman group found is that this is actually more harmful than helpful uh which was a big surprise to us uh so we have started taking not started we have a long time ago taking this out uh and just leaving a blank search field so if you have a placeholder this is hopefully an easy fix that you can do while you're doing your audits to get rid of this because people don't understand necessarily that they're supposed to click in there or what they're supposed to do when it has text already in it I mentioned before that search has to be in the header at least above the fold which is an expression that actually comes from the print world but when we look at say a desktop or a laptop scenario it means without having to scroll um so that's above the fold when we start talking about digital but at the very least it has to be at near the top of a site to tell you a little anecdote several years ago we had a library come to us that wanted a new website they were a new client and they were insisting that they wanted search in the footer they did not want it anywhere near the top of the page and after some discussion within our agency we declined to take them as clients we decided that we didn't want our name associated with that just because your library doesn't mean that we're going to do that we don't want people to think that's how we handle websites um and because we also by the way don't make a profit because we're a state agency so we're not required to take on libraries as clients fortunately that was enough to make them rethink their position and they decided that they would live with it being where it was actually supposed to be so the search is supposed to be up top remember first and last resort so people need to know that it's available a neat tool that you can use as part of your audit is again google right google's everything pretty much it seemed like but google has a neat little tool that will tell you what people are searching for when they look for you specifically so this is german town public library a small library here in ohio and i threw this into their their interface just to see what came back and you can see the vast majority of the options that people were inputting to google to find this library you know german town public library german town library so forth but the two most interesting pieces here for me even though they didn't get many clicks but this still lists them in in descending order as you can see down at the bottom german town library hours and german town library jobs they don't have a ton of clicks but this is also a teeny little library so i'm not expecting them to have a ton of hits for those pages so what does that say if you're doing an audit it means well maybe we need to be prioritizing the things that people are actually looking for something to consider this is a neat way to really focus on how people are using your site another thing that you can find through google search console which is a related tool has to do with knowing whether or not you have a site map now when i talk about a site map i'm talking about one that is created with xml not something where you basically said here is the top level page about us and under about us is the history of the library and services and all these things a human made site map is not the same one that can be read by a human normally is not the same as what google actually wants and the reason that google wants this is because it's a structured representation of your site's content and it can index it better you get a more thorough indexing by the google overlords if you have an xml site map so this is something that you should consider adding if you're using a content management system it almost certainly has an option for that or something you can add in that will do that so this this will definitely help your stuff get found better so to sum up and then i'll take questions because i'm sure hopefully there are some but the big things to remember today after everything i've just yacked about remember that there are actual rules and i try to emphasize this every time i talk about web design to libraries in any way because so much of the early web people are still holding on to and it's it's almost always anecdotal just like when somebody says to me well mr smith told us at the reference desk that he didn't like where this button is that is not data one of my favorite sayings is anecdotes are not data so your anecdote doesn't compare to the actual studies that have been done on behavior by users so remember that there are rules just like certain i told you today about where your logo should go where that search should go you shouldn't have placeholders these are all based on data these are not things that i made up just because i feel like being mean today this is another thing your website is not a special snowflake i know because i also have a library degree that libraries are taught to consider their communities when they do collection development which is absolutely right and you should continue doing that the problem is that that philosophy does not apply to websites because websites have a user interface if your site operates way differently than say anything else online and people have to learn how to use your website some of you may be old enough to remember we used to have to teach people how to use library websites they were actual programs on event calendar how to use the library website you never ever want to be in a position to be doing that anymore your your site should not be a special snowflake so when you're doing audits remember that you don't just bypass something like oh well our our patrons want this no they don't no they don't that's anecdotes people have normalized standard behaviors and they need to be accommodated when you're working with your website or working on your website so that's a lot and that's only part of what i do in an audit but the things i think if you're going to get started with auditing that you should probably focus on the most so i'm happy to take comments questions tomatoes you want to throw at me whatever you got snowballs as season that's right well i've got my own snowball so i'll pass those on thanks um yes anybody have any questions um type in the question section of your go to webinar interface um it is um a little after 11 o'clock but that's okay we will um stay on here as long as anyone has any questions get all your questions answered before we do wrap things up so if there's anything um you want to know more about anything you were confused about want more clarification um if you have anything you want to share about what your libraries have done as far as doing an audit of them or struggling with anything on your website type into the question section we didn't um get any questions as you were talking but that's okay people are just very um okay so we do have one question okay okay okay here we go now of course things come in thank you for a fun and educational presentation great um oh and someone says appreciate all the resources you shared as well um yes something i'll mention the slides will also be available along with the recording later too so um you'll have all of this information and any of the links that are on here um will be available to you um as well um the question we have and i think it will be specific to where you are ohio um so wants to know what is your availability and cost for consultation now you work for a state your state agency of in ohio so i'm assuming this is just something that you actually do for ohio libraries not outside of the state that is correct um so the services that i offer are basically for ohio public libraries that's the scope of our agency um i will tell you and i don't this is promotional tell me to shut up and i will stop um but i i have been asked to do um audits of libraries that are outside of ohio if that's the case um then maybe hit me up by email and i can direct you uh to how that works but it's it's not something that i mean to put out there is like something i'm looking to do all the time right right so so so lauren here just tells like this something you can do not necessarily selling her services um because you know as i said you work for your in ohio state agency so yeah but it could have plays people you talk to um someone wants to know the sites you mentioned to use for the audit are they easy to use those sites i am not it this is something we have here and you mentioned too that you do this mainly for the small and medium sized libraries and that is a big thing we have here in Nebraska i'm so many most of our libraries all are small one person only a couple people um running them so they do need something that they can easily jump into that's a fair question so i think most of the tools that i showed today are pretty easy with the exception of uh google's page speed insights or lighthouse and um gt metrics those will give you both of them will give you tons and tons of information the problem is interpreting that information and i understand that so at the very least you might want to put your site through those tools to give you some idea of how you're doing if you don't have the resources to fix it at the very least you might want to be thinking about some of the other things that i mentioned even if you can't interpret the reports you know are you optimizing your images or do you have plugins uh that you're not using anymore um those are fairly easy fixes for the most part and may take some time off your speed yeah there's some easy good things you can do yeah um oh you have a question about something that we have here at Nebraska and i am actually going to um i'm going to pull presenter control back to my screen because i did want to show i was i planned on talking about this so uh thanks to deb for that question and someone says great information thank you so much a lot to think about yes the questions and of course as you see here there's a carousel running on this page let's just not talk about that anyway here in Nebraska for Nebraska libraries we do have our Nebraska libraries on the web project where we host wordpress sites for um it says over hundreds of 114 libraries in Nebraska um we don't have library systems in Nebraska if each library is its own individual entity um we have about 270 something public libraries in the state and 114 of them we are hosting their websites um through wordpress through this project that's been around for i don't even know how long a long time uh and the question is what are your thoughts on our shared wordpress server because this is something where we host them on a shared server here um to the library commission now we have staff that are in charge of this here so um and then the libraries just have their sites that so we do the the back end of all of this so they want to know like what do you i guess what is your thoughts on what we are doing here in Nebraska oh okay well i haven't looked at the service at all um i think the fact that you're providing ready-made sites that's always a good thing um as far as the shared server concept that really depends you know if you have a lot of small sites then it may not be an issue and if it is that's something you need to talk to your it folks about it's you know maybe splitting that up or um using a caching server or something that's going to fix that if it's a problem there's nothing inherently wrong with the shared server it can be an issue if you're sharing the server with a resource hog so for example and this isn't happening but let's say that you know Toledo is sharing a server with Germantown and Germantown is that tiny little library i was showing you the the search options for um that could be a problem um you know Toledo is far far bigger and i'm sure gets way more traffic than Germantown ever would i can tell you for an organization that i do the website for it's a tiny little organization it's on a shared commercial server and i have no way of knowing what else is on that server but i can tell you the organization site is pitifully slow there's nothing i can do about it because it's on this server and again nothing else i can do about it so we're stuck with it if you don't have to be stuck with it don't be that's all i can say but it might be perfectly fine there in Nebraska yeah and this is something it is yeah you said it's not the big libraries that are coming to us like our Omaha Lincoln um the big they've got their own thing going and it's great this is the littlest ones and um we have multiple servers that we have for various things here through the library commission so i mean we're the state agency running and hosting this year and and our staff are uh i don't believe we've ever had any issues with that because yeah there's no i've never heard of any particular library overwhelming the system um we also have we do have an regional library systems here's our central plains library system they are not library systems in this in this in the like in other states where libraries become members of them they are more an outreach from the commission a regional person um like i was talking about was like a boots on the ground where um to do training and um consultation helping libraries do their job they don't become members of it it's just like another arm of us here at the library commission um but they have their websites through um the Nebraska libraries and the web project too cool this is just one of them our central plains for the the middle of the state of Nebraska um and we're always getting new libraries added to it um um and i should mention it's so interesting that we're doing this session this session here today and um i'm going to go to our encompass live website now and show you oops encompass live if you use encompass live in your search engine of choice whatever you like to use um it will always come up with us our main page in our archive page um so far with the only thing called that on the internet as far as i can tell so nobody else doesn't have to use that name but um if you go to our main page here you will see actually in two weeks we are doing a wordpress website refresh session session um which um will probably be something very similar to hear talking about auditing looking at um you know different ways to prevent content present content um how to update things on your wordpress sites that either you have yourself or that we host for you so i think this would be a nice kind of companion session to um today's doing the audit cool yeah um so this is our um pretty sweet tech Amanda sweet is our technology innovation librarian she's in charge of her Nebraska libraries on the web project um and once a month she comes on encompass live it's always the last Wednesday of the month to do something techy related it's uh we have techy related things other times during the the months sometimes but always the last Wednesday of the month it's her session and for january this is what she's doing the wordpress website refresh session you can see her next one be february 20th yeah all right does anybody have any other questions i don't see any new ones coming in while we were just chatting here but if anyone has anything desperate you want to ask of lora uh type into the question section while i'm waiting to see if anything comes up i will um show you here so this is our main page with our upcoming shows but our archives are right here there's a link at the bottom right underneath them for our show archives most recent ones at the top of the page today's show will be up there by the end of the day tomorrow um wordpress not repress as long as go to webinar and youtube cooperate with me there'll be a link here um there'll be a link to um lora slides you can send them to me whenever you get a chance lora okay we'll do and um everyone who attended today's show and registered for today's show we'll get an email from me letting you know when the recording is available we also post it on our social media we do have a facebook page for encompass live if you like to use facebook give us a like over there we post reminders she's reminder login today's show um here's the notification the recording of last week's um show so we will post um out here when um the recording is available uh we also post onto our twitter account and instagram uh we use end comp live little abbreviation hashtag for the show so we'll get announced out there and then also push out onto our uh nabrasco library commission mailing lists when the recording is available here there we go uh while we're here on the recording page i'll show you there is a search feature if you want to see if we've done a show on any particular topic that you might be interested in you can search our show archives you can search all of our show archives or just the most recent 12 months if you want something very current um that is because this is all of our show archives and i'm not going to scroll all the way down but as you can see this is a very long page if you can see the little circle scroll bar speaking of scrolling as you were earlier um this goes back to when end compass live first premiered which was in january 2009 so yeah this january 2024 is the beginning of our 16th year of the show which blows my mind every time i say that but um but we have all of our show archives here we have them all on our youtube um so just uh pay attention when you're watching an old show to the original broadcast date they all have a date so you know when it first um um happened uh some of the shows would be great um good um stand the test of time be good still useful but some things become old and outdated um resources and services may have changed drastically or no longer exist anymore people may work at completely different libraries than when or organizations than when they presented to us with us like 10 years ago um links may be broken we don't have a lot of staff here go back and double check links necessarily so you may find some things broken out there let me know if there is we can always fix things on the five but just pay attention to those broadcast dates um but you know this is something libraries do we keep things for historical purposes and as long as we have somewhere to host all of our archive which right now is on youtube uh we will always have we will always have the full um archive out there for everybody all right so I didn't see any good any questions coming in so I think we will wrap it up for today thank you everybody for joining us thank you so much Laura for being here today this is really great useful information as you said yes there's a lot you're very welcome I hope that people find it useful and they can at least use it to get started with an audit yeah absolutely absolutely um but do reach out to her if you have any other questions um and uh sign up for our upcoming shows next week our show I mentioned a week in two weeks is the pre-sweet tech but next week show up next week is our best new teen reads of 2023 um this is Sally Snyder our coordinator of children and young adult library services here's the library commission her annual wrap up of new books for middle and high school levels that she read in 2023 that she thought might be of interest to you I know people look forward to these um this is her teen reads one and if you look at our archive she did her best of children's book back books list back in November so that's her companion show the recording's already out there um and then she also has her summer reading one that she did in December those are her three end of the year sessions that she always does um with book lists that you can use um for children's books next year summer reading and now uh teen so please do sign up for that show and any of our other upcoming shows there's all of our February ones already on the calendar so thank you everybody for being here thanks Laura and hope we'll see you all on a future episode of Encompass Live. Bye bye