"About Us" pages in websites

[Urie, Allyson]

Hi Rachel,

Please note that I am first and foremost a librarian!  I have minimal web design experience and inherited a pretty ugly library website to maintain when I started working here in 2013.

I’m in the final steps of redesigning our library website.  Our old website had multiple, separate pages full of lots of text about the library and our policies .  After a lot of research over the last few years, I found that users will not read huge chunks of information aka “walls of text” on a website.  I cut all of these pages down to the bare minimum amount of information, written in very user friendly language ( No library jargon).  Our About Us page is very simple.  It contains our library mission statement, our staffed hours and staff contact information.
  We also don’t have an FAQ section on the library website.  We are a very small medical institution and our users are comfortable coming up to us and asking questions.  For this reason, I made the decision to not have a FAQ section.  I do however, have many places on the website to contact the library via phone and email.  Our institutional policies are on our school’s Blackboard portal and are very accessible, so I didn’t feel the need to reiterate them on the library website.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me off list!

Thanks!

Allyson

Allyson Urie
Web Services Librarian
Commonwealth Medical College
525 Pine Street Scranton, PA 18519
570-687-9678
aurie at tcmc.edu



From: Web technologies in libraries [mailto:WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Rachel Vidrine
Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2016 9:20 AM
To: WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: [WEB4LIB] "About Us" pages in websites

Hi,
I am trying to decide the best way to balance a user-focused "About the Library" page with a Policies page on a library website. Should there be two separate pages, one user-focused that addresses common patron questions, and another, more formal document written as a policies manual? Is there a way to combine the two? Or is it more typical to keep a policies/procedures manual as an internal document that staff can refer to when needed? It is of my opinion that the important information that patrons want should be extracted from the policies manual and rewritten to be user-friendly, but it is not always possible to get colleagues and managers on board with that.
Thanks for any insight,
Rachel Vidrine
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