Bedale Community Library Site Overhaul
Bedale Community Library (BCL) approached WJPS in December 2022 looking for a full site overhaul from our Web Consultation Service. Their site is primerily for updating Library users and Bedale residents of any classes, services they provide, and events they are holding. They also need their website to advertise vacancies and display information about how the Library runs, and how to donate or become a Friend of the Library.
They felt that their site was not as easy to navigate as it could be, hadn't been updated for a few years, and they were finding it difficult to edit and update. We ran a full site overhaul, updating pages and implementing new features, and provided further training and a personalised instruction booklet.
New Tiles Feature
We have recently begun designing a new feature for our WCS sites. This feature has not yet been released to all WCS sites, as it is still in development, and the Library kindly allowed us to test the feature on their sites homepage.
We have created 'Tiles', which are essentially buttons that link to other pages on the site, with an image as the background, and space for text on over the image. This style has become a very popular design choice in recent months, so we have decided to create a feature to make it quick and easy to add these Tiles to your pages.
We have set up a set of four tiles for BCL, linking to the pages they decided were the most relevant to help site visitors navigate to the relevant pages as easily as possible.
Optimising WCS Features
WCS has many helpful features to help you keep your site up to date, clean, and easy to navigate. Often, the more established WCS sites do not use newer features, as they have have had their site since before we released the features. Our Consultation service gives us a great chance to optimise these features for our clients.
Recent News Stories
During our original Consultation meeting, Volunteers of the Library told us that they were interested in using their News feature more, and writing more content to keep site visitors up to date. They thought it would be a good place to compile information that can be sharded across their various social media outlets.
Recently, we designed a new way of displaying recent news stories on pages. Originally, we displayed News stories on the right hand side of the page, on a rolling feed. Now we have added the option to display them directly within the content of the page, organised into three cards with the title and a preview of the story.
We optimised this feature for Bedale Community Library by adding their recent news to their homepage, along with writing some instructional material about how to make the most of WCSs News feature, and directing the team towards some of our News Feature oriented News Stories. We also created a standard format for their news stories, to make formatting as easy as possible.
New Galleries Display Feature
Along with displaying their three most recent news stories, we also implemented another new feature on their site that came to WCS in 2022.
The library often hold events, talks and classes, and it is always nice for site visitors to see images past activities to get an idea of what to expect from the library.
Our galleries feature allows you to add a gallery of images to a page in an accessible and compliant way. The feature was already in use on the Bedale Community Library website, but they were using our older slide show display style. In our initial meeting we decided that our new galleries display style, the grid, would be better for their site.
We converted their existing galleries from the slide show style to our grid style, and arranged the images in rows of four.
Galleries are edited outside of the page, meaning they can be displayed on multiple pages, and when an image is added, edited or removed, it automatically updates on all pages. This stops library staff having to spend a long time editing images in a gallery.
Training
Once we had finished thesite overhaul of the Bedale Community Library site, we invited two of their Volunteers to come to our office for training. This helped us open up a discussion about what they liked, disliked, and are unsure of when it comes to the site.
During the session we made a couple of tweaks to the site to maximise usability, and edit any information that is out of date, missing, or no longer relevant.
We also used this meeting to do some website training that was relevant to their specific site. We worked together to create a News Story in their set formatting, adding and removing gallery images, and creating events.
In preparation for this training session, we had created a pack of personalised crib sheets to help the library volunteers get to grips with editing and updating their site.
"The website overhaul is a great improvement. It is more user friendly and will be easier for everyone to navigate.
The training received was extremely useful, WJPS have answered and resolved any queries we had. The printed notes will be a lifeline!"
- Katherine Howe, Bedale Community Library Volunteer.
"As the site looks better and is more user friendly more people will look at it. The information they may look for is easier to find.
You explained things very clearly and now we feel much more confident about managing it ourselves."
- Sarah Maude, Bedale Community Library Volunteer.
"That looks so much better! Well done to everyone involved.”
- Trustee, Bedale Community Library.
Published: 22/02/2023 Published by: WJPS
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