Iowatown School Library

School Library Web Site Development Tutorial

1. Be Businesslike, Not Busy
	Use Arial and other regular fonts for easier online reading. Avoid patterned backgrounds, flashing text, etc. "While a busy classroom is good, a busy website is not" (Warlick, 2005). Use a white or very light background for easier online reading. Use indenting, bullets, bolded headings, & subheadings to facilitate skimming.

2. Skip the Apple
	Avoid clip art, especially traditional school symbol graphics such as apples, rulers, pencils, etc. since they detract from the true personality of the web site. Use actual photos of students engaged in learning activities for a professional look and a positive view of the school library. Also avoid pictures of the outsides of buildings; instead favor what goes on inside the library.

3. Up to Date

Avoid construction zones since they annoy Web users. Keep current versions of calendars, new book lists, current research projects, newsletters and anything else dated. Provide timely features e.g. links to reviews of the hottest technology gadgets for the coming holiday shopping season or feature student reviews of the best vacations near summer vacation (Warlick, 2005). Track which of your pages will require frequent updating and limit this number of pages wherever possible. For example, on biography pages, do NOT say, "This is my 2nd year in the library." Instead say, "I've been the teacher-librarian and Iowatown School since 2005" (Use this technique where possible to limit the amount of updating required monthly or even annually. Fix broken links regularly.

4. Inside & Outside

Provide links outside the library. Merely listing search engines is not enough. Provide links to library directories for students as well as links selected specifically for your building and classrooms. Provide links to materials inside the library as well as to external websites. Students need constant reminders that all materials may ultimately be used in conjunction with one another and what a better place to do it than on the library web site? Create pathfinders with combined lists of sources from inside to subscription databases, to web links outside the library.

5. Annotate & Organize

It is surprising that all library web sites do not alphabetize lists of web sites, classes, or other content that appears in long lists. It almost seems too obvious for librarians! Additionally, if the lists are particularly long, they should be categorized first and then listed alphabetically. Too often, lists of links appear disorganized and "unlibrary-like." Annotate your lists of web sites with brief descriptions so that users may decide whether or not to visit this site, and what they should expect to find when they get there. Include a brief note about content and the source of information at this site. Help your students to understand authority of web sites by showing that you understand it and can include it in your annotations. For example, annotate the link to The Short Index of Model Rocket Slides with the following, "Part of a NASA education project, this list of links offers quick access to a wealth of information on model rocketry, including software that enables students to create and "fly" virtual model rockets." Annotation source: (Minkel, 2002)

6. Promote!

Be sure that your library web site is prominently listed on the district homepage so that it will be easy for visitors to find and return to the site. (If UNI, ISU, and the Univ of Iowa can all list their libraries on the university homepage, then so can your district!) If there are multiple buildings all with library websites, then one unified page for libraries with links to all the respective building library web sites could be created. Use the Promote feature built-in to programs such as IowaPages to automatically submit them to search engines. Enter brief annotations of your site in the boxes designated for meta-tags. Include your library URL everywhere! Put it on your letterhead, business cards, handouts, manuals, email signature, and voicemail recording.

7. Stick with Seven

You must have a global navigation bar (one that appears in exactly the same way, in exactly the same place on ALL site pages). The rule of thumb is to use no more than 7 items in a global navigation bar because that is the highest number of items the brain is supposed to be able to deal with at one time. Choose these 7 items very wisely. Users of your site should intuitively see how to get to everything they need by using these 7 items. Think of them as a Table of Contents that the user can use to get to each chapter of your site. A link back to the district homepage or a building homepage are not part of your library site so put them somewhere else, and not in the 7-item global navigation bar. It will confuse users if they click on links within the global navigation and then the global navigation disappears because they are taken entirely to a different site. Put links to the district and building elsewhere on your page - or at least in smaller type or a different color. You could also use a school logo on the page somewhere that could double as a hyperlink back to the school district hompage.