Web Site Standards for Usability and Design

[Michael Schofield]

Hi Carolyn, 

There are the stock usability.gov standards, plus a lot of work done by
Jakob Nielsen (http://www.useit.com) as well as the W3C Web Accessibility
Initiative (http://www.w3.org/WAI). For HTML5 standards and debunking some
element myths, I use http://html5doctor.com/ instead of the hard-to-read W3C
HTML5 spec. There are also good code validators out there. You may want to
familiarize yourself with ARIA Roles, which are useful for allowing screen
readers to make sense of your website. Here's the doc
(http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/roles).

I'm not sure what you follow or are familiar with, so here are some recent
random resources: 

I just read the book "User Experience (UX) Design for Libraries" which,
published this year, is relatively up to date. It's a good jumping-off point
for a library redesign project. It's a quick read and it focuses on
responsive design. Here's the GoodReads Link
(http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14905971-user-experience-ux-design-for-l
ibraries). 

IMHO, for your library website to live without major subsequent redesigns
for a couple years, your team should really focus on making it
future-friendly and responsive - unless you have another strategy for
serving-up optimized content to multiple devices (maybe you have an app or a
separate mobile site, I don't know).

Andrew Careaga last week posted a future-friendly Friday Five inspired by a
presentation by Dave Olsen (his site, Mobile in Higher
Ed--www.dmolsen.com--is full of resources) that I think is useful: 

1. The future-friendly manifesto (http://futurefriend.ly) -> a new[ish],
important design philosophy in the web community.
2. Future-Ready Content
(http://www.alistapart.com/articles/future-ready-content)
3. Mobile web best practices (http://mobilewebbestpractices.com)
4. Mobilekarma.com (http://www.mobilekarma.com/)
5. Go Mobile at Texas A&M: their mobile strategy, WITH A LOT OF RESOURCES
(http://gomobile.tamu.edu/) 

Matthew Riedsma posted his ALA Annual presentation on Responsive Web Design
for Libraries here (http://matthew.reidsrow.com/articles/23) and he lists 18
additional resources. 

Sorry for the scattered email O_o. Feel free to get in touch with me for,
well, anything. 

Michael Schofield | mschofield at nova.edu
Front-End Librarian at NSU



-----Original Message-----
From: Web technologies in libraries [mailto:WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On
Behalf Of Blatchley, Carolyn
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2012 3:55 PM
To: WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Web Site Standards for Usability and Design

As we move toward a web site redesign project, I'm looking to the community
for advice on the most current web site standards, specifically those for
public libraries. Do you have a favorite publication or web resource that
you've recently used?

I respect the information outlined at http://www.usability.gov/ and the
related publication found there called "The Research-Based Web Design &
Usability Guidelines, Enlarged/Expanded Edition", but it was issued by the
U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services in August 2006 and it seems to me
there could be something more recent.

Looking forward to hearing what others are using!

Carolyn Blatchley
Training Services Coordinator
Cumberland County Library System
1601 Ritner Highway, Suite 100
Carlisle, PA 17013-9380
717.240.5379 | cblatchley at ccpa.net
cumberlandcountylibraries.org



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