This week we announced the public preview of our new website. We also posted a link to the current site alerting visitors to visit the new site and give it a test drive. This project has been a collaboration between staff from the library, the UR communications office and web development group. It officially began with our first planning meeting in October 2008, and we’re very happy to be at this point. The key features we’re implementing include a persistent search box which is in the site header allowing users to search our resources (catalog, journal subscriptions, databases, research and course guides, and site) from any page they happen to be on. Beside the search box is a link to launch a pop-up chat window allowing the user to continue using our site while getting live assistance. There’s also a standard navigation bar which is part of the header allowing for consistent navigation from every page on the site. We still have much to do and numerous refinements to add but I believe we’re off to a great start. Another part of the redesign is our transition to UR’s new content management system, Cascade Server from Hannon Hill. It’s a major improvement over our current CMS. It creates very clean code and is much more flexible for future changes and development.
We have also licensed LibGuides from Springshare for our subject/major and course specific guides. LibGuides is a hosted service and lets you build incredibly focused guides for your users. There are some libraries that use LibGuides to host their entire website, which shows you how flexible the product is. LibGuides is also easily customized by using custom cascading style sheets and we’ve been able to apply our new site’s template so that it fully blends with the rest of our new site.
You can preview our beta site at http://xlibrary.richmond.edu and I’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions! The site will stay in beta until early August when we’ll retire the current site.
