Moving Forward: Library Website Redesign

Libraries Web presence is becoming more essential nowadays than ever because more library resources, services, and instruction are accessible through libraries websites. The Web is always evolving since its birth. Meanwhile, it is common for libraries to spend years on a website redesign project. Last time, the Texas Tech University (TTU) Libraries launched their website in 2008. It took more than five years for the Libraries to redesign, develop, and launch its site. After the new position, Web Librarian, was filled in September 2015, a new website redesign started. In 2017 August, the TTU Libraries launched its new site. The redesign took less than two years, and it mainly included content repository development, content audit, and improvement, homepage redesign, navigation system improvement, and content management system (CMS) selection. During this period, we have used several usability testing methods, such as card sorting, XO test, etc. to make sure the new design meets the patrons expectations. We also combined the usability testing results with usage statistics from Google Analytics especially when we made decisions on homepage real estate allocation. Beyond that, we migrated from PHP pages to the content management system, OmniUpdate, which the Texas Tech University has utilized since 2014. The new website adopted the University s most recent Web template to ensure better accessibility, security, and responsiveness. The adoption of OmniUpdate and the University s template have reduced the Libraries workload on website maintenance. After the website went live, we have kept both the old and the new sites running to make sure the users would be able to locate resources and information during the transition. We proposed this presentation to share our stories in website redesign, project management, usability testing, and CMS selection. Hope our experience will be helpful to ongoing and future library website redesign projects.