Tomorrow (18 May 2011) sees the launch of a shiny new website for SLHT Library & Knowledge Services. The library manager at PRU and myself have been hard at work over the last few weeks and months getting all the pages ship-shape to launch for Knowledge Awareness Week 2011. We have been fortunate in that we only had to adapt an already-existing website but has still been quite a challenge deciding what to keep, what to get rid of, how the whole thing should be organised and how to make it visually appealing!
The website is run on the open source content management program Joomla! , which I had no experience of previously but I found it pretty easy to use. We decided quite early on that we didn't want just text and had the idea of using blue textboxes of varying hues for people navigate round the site. One of the trickiest parts was trying to get these boxes all the same width and height as they are all dependent on each other.
We also had to agree on the language used across the site and ensure everything was consistent across all the pages, like what pages should open in a new window and having hover-text over links. It's always the small things that take the longest!
However the last documents were uploaded today and linked in so it looks as though we have ourselves a website! I am pleased with it and really glad to have something decent to present to our users that they can use on and off-site. Now we just have to make sure everyone knows about it!
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