"About Us" pages in websites

[Elaine]

We are also redesigning our website.

 

Our survey told us that people go to our website to look at the catalogue, look for our hours and to find out information about programs. Although we are going to include some policies, they are going into the last dropdown menu and we are including only minimal information. 

 

Elaine Anderson

Public Services Coordinator

Pelham Public Library

43 Pelham Town Square

Box 830

Fonthill, ON L0S 1E0

(905) 892-6443

www.pelhamlibrary.on.ca

 

From: Web technologies in libraries [mailto:WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Urie, Allyson
Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2016 10:56 AM
To: WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [WEB4LIB] "About Us" pages in websites

 

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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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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