Website of the Month
So the site I've been losing sleep over for the past couple of weeks months is finally up. I had set a deadline for the beginning of the year and, by golly, I made it -- even if the thing kind of put a damper on my holiday activities: http://oar.uic.edu
Contrary to a lot of the stuff I've been doing recently, this project didn't focus on CMS's. In fact the goal was to develop a new 'template' for the Dreamweaver/Contribute-based system that they use at UIC's Office of Admissions & Records (OAR). This allowed me to focus a bit more on the visual or graphic end of things -- creating a new template out of whole cloth rather than grabbing something ready-made and adapting that, with an image here and an image there, to my own needs.
Of course, when you're developing something for a large public institution, it not only has to look good but the code has to validate (natch); it also has to run on everything from the latest version of Safari and Chrome to the horrifyingly antiquated IE6. Equally important, the site has to be accessibility-friendly -- meeting and (at least for stuff I do) hopefully exceeding both guidelines in general and those more specific to Illinois (i.e. IITAA).
So it's done. The initial release will be followed up by a couple of studies I want to do on our stats (thank you Google Analytics), plus interviews and focus groups with our staff and user base.
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Here's something I launched in between bites of turkey over the weekend: http://www.CitizenAction-IL.org
It's for a great statewide organization that's very active in health care reform among other things.
Basically I took what they already had -- essentially a site consisting of links and pdf files -- and completely automated the thing so that in-house staff can add content themselves rather than sending it out to a web specialist.
The thing's running on Drupal with Panels for the front page. My focus was on automating as much of the site as possible including all the navigation and menus -- so that again, in-house staff could manage these things.
I went with WYSIWYG for the first time for content creation, including IMCE for managing stock photos and of course, ImageCache for pretty much everything else. Since the in-house staff was more comfortable with MS Word, going this way made sense.
Style-wise, I pretty much worked off the design of the previous site. This allowed me, again, to focus on the automation side, while leaving the option, further down the road, of coming up with something a bit more snazzy.
For the moment, it's totally serviceable and meets the needs of the organization. And that's what ultimately counts.
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You know it's bad news when the FAQs start with:
"The budget for the state of Illinois is in a shambles."
I came upon it fresh from an article on Library Journal with the ominous title:
LJ's 2009 Placements & Salaries Survey Shows Tough Library Job Market
Anyway, back to the Illinois site. The FAQ continues:
Regional library systems received a 16.5% cut resulting in layoffs and cessation of some library support services.
They've got a badge (which you can download here) as well as a Facebook Page.
If you're in Illinois, you can use their 'Take Action' page to contact your state legislator.
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It's 2009 and the Chicago Tribune has only now figured out what it takes to design a website. Still, you have to hand it to them, it's a vast improvement over the previous iteration. They even went back to the old letterhead.
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Okay, today was the official launch of the new community site that I've been working on for the Public Library Association: PLAspace.org
The announcement reads:
Today marks another milestone in the rollout of PLAspace. We officially open the doors to new CoPs and new participants.
We created PLAspace to give Public Library Association members a place where they could share ideas and work together on common interests. Today, the first official day for the site, we already have several dozen members and a half-dozen CoPs.
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I'm still kind of knocked out -- been working 24/7 on this for several weeks. That said, I'm pleased to announce the availability online of DebbieHalvorson.com.
Debbie's running for Congress in the 11th CD of Illinois.
The site is fully automated using Drupal for content management. Campaign staff can add images to any content type (eg. press release, blog post, etc.) They can also designate any post as "spotlight" for the 'In Focus' section on the front page.
Even the main slideshow which is meant to present broad campaign themes, can be changed simply by uploading new images to the site. Resizing is done automatically.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with the results.
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Here's a preview of something I've been working on. It's called the "Chicago Documentation Center" and it's going to be the home for various exhibits and digitization projects that I'll be doing.
The full name is "Chicago Documentation Center: Documenting the Life and Times of Chicago and the American Midwest".
The scope is pretty wide -- basically anything of historical or cultural value in the city of Chicago, the state of Illinois or the U.S. as a whole.
I'll be working on at least one project over the next few months. The "official" launch won't be for a while yet.
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LibSite.org : A Recommendation Service for Library-related Websites: Just a sneak peek of LibSite.org -- a recommendation service for library related websites. I've been working on it for a while and will probably be announcing it "officially" at some point early next week.
It's built around the premise that library-related projects need and deserve a higher profile, that the technology allows us to engage this material in any number of ways.
So of course, the site features a blog, a wiki, RSS feeds and email alerts (the last two being configurable down to the individual tag). Users can rate sites and add them to a "favorites" page. There's even a LibSite Widget that people can put on their own sites (see the side navigation here for an example).
Of course, the key is user-involvement. It's not going to be much of a site if I'm the only one contributing to it. Everyone can recommend sites and even when people don't feel like doing that, they can leave constructive comments or otherwise take advantage of libSite's features.
So have a look and tell me what you think: http://libSite.org
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The Queens Borough Library Website is so good that it made me want to do this review. It practically cried out for it. The developers have done a fantastic job. They've taken features we routinely find on other sites -- features like creating accounts, specifying preferences and grouping information -- and applied them to a library context.
In so doing, they've upped the standard of what a library website can do -- and what the public can expect from one. They've also provided a good model for other libraries to follow.
(more after the jump...)
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