Library Website Redesign

We’ve been busy building our new site all summer and we’re *this* close to launching (noon, Thursday, August 28th)! Here are a few techie details about the new site:

Content Management System: Drupal

# of pages (nodes): 2,550

Drupal modules implemented:

• Captcha
• CCK
• CCK Field Indexer
• Comment Mail
• Custom Breadcrumbs
• Aggregator
• Blog
• BlogAddons
• Color
• Comment
• Devel
• Devel Node Access
• Elements
• Event
• External Links
• Faceted Search
• FCKEditor
• FieldIndexer
• Filters
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Google Co-op CSE
• Help
• Iconizer
• ImageCache
• IMCE
• Input Filters
• Insert View
• Javascript Tools
• jQuery Update
• Links
• NeighborForge
• Menu
• Nice Menus
• Node Field Indexer
• Node Import
• Panels
• Path
• Pathauto
• Poll
• Profile
• Search
• Search404
• Service Links
• Statistics
• Tabs Example
• Taxonomy
• Upload
• Views
• Webform
• XML Sitemap

Don’t forget to check out library.mcmaster.ca tomorrow for the big reveal!

The project team recently got away for a “redesign retreat” to get the project off the ground and make some key decisions regarding the new site. The term “retreat” calls to mind a getaway to a distant, pastoral setting, doesn’t it? Well, we went to the Student Centre. Not very distant, and far from pastoral! Still, we had a very productive 2 days dealing with everything from features to navigation to wireframes, and we left our retreat feeling like we had accomplished a lot. The image above is the top-level wireframe we drew up on the whiteboard on day 2 of our retreat (aside: isn’t it great how the post-its in the picture coordinate so beautifully with colours on this blog?!).

Which brings me to a request. We came up with the top-level navigation for the site during the retreat and we’d very much like to test it out on some library users (students, faculty, and staff) soon. If you’d like to participate in a quick and easy (and hopefully fun!) card sorting exercise, let me know (or leave a comment on this post). More details on that soon!

We did the redesign survey to get feedback from our users (ALL our users — students, faculty & staff) about the existing library website in order to inform the decisions we make about the redesign. And we got some great feedback! 186 members of the McMaster community responded to the survey — a response rate we were thrilled with!

Some of your feedback didn’t surprise us (not enough white space? We agree!) and some threw us for a loop (good navigation? Really?) but rest assured that we read every last bit of input and plan to use as much of it as we possibly can. Also, many of you were generous enough to offer your time to participate in some focus groups and we’re certainly going to take you up on that offer! (More details on that soon.)

If you’d like to have a closer look at the survey results, here’s a PDF with the aggregated responses.

Thanks again to everyone who responded to the survey!

Congratulations to Danielle Lorenz! Danielle’s name was selected from a random draw of names of those who provided feedback in the Library Website Redesign survey.

Enjoy your printer, Danielle!

Thanks to everyone who took the time to complete the Website Redesign Survey. If you haven’t completed the survey yet, you still have time to do so. We’re closing the survey on Friday, March 21st and we’ll announce the winner of the Canon Photo Printer next week!

Take the survey here.

Our redesign survey is ready to go! Please take a moment to tell us what you think about the website. There’s a Canon PIXMA Photo printer up for grabs for anyone who leaves their name & contact info!

The survey is online at this link.

We (the Core Team) had our first meeting today and decided that our first order of business (other than setting up this blog!) would be to conduct a survey to get feedback from all our users – students, faculty, and staff. We really want this redesign to be informed by the people who use the website, so we’re putting together a few survey questions that will, hopefully, get to the heart of what is and is not working on our current site, and we’ll use those responses to come up with a list of priorities for the redesign.

I’ll post the link to the survey when it’s ready to go. Stay tuned!

Welcome to the Library Website Redesign blog! You can find more info about the redesign project here and the roll-call for who’s involved is right here.

We’ll be using this blog to provide regular updates on the status of the project as well as the redesign process in general. Grab the RSS feed and stay in the loop!