I just ranged on my local library. The site is http://www.publiclibrary.org and it is a disgrace! Here’s the email I sent them:

I have lived Hopkins County for all of my life, and I must say that I am highly disappointed by your website. You have a domain name that could get you so much traffic. I imagine other libraries would kill to have the domain publiclibrary.org And yet, you do virtually nothing with this website. Much of the content hasn’t been updated in forever even though people have submitted link changes (AR list link changes, for example). It’s highly unattractive. The navigation is in no logical order and is confusing. It’s hard to find the information you’re looking for. It comes across as very unprofessional and unorganized. The flashing graphics included on several pages are un-necessary and slow down connection speeds for patrons using dial-up internet. You shouldn’t include the date the page was updated unless you plan on updating it frequently. I found several pages that were last updated in 2004. The preschool page is a rainbow mess. This is all very distracting to a patron.

I believe you need to find a professional web designer to design your website. It needs a major overhaul. It makes me sad to see my local library make itself look so amateur. I would like to see the website look more updated and professional. I suspect that visually imparied patrons could probably not utilize this website at all because I am guessing this website does not meet accessability standards. I tested the site with the W3C Markup Validation (http://validator.w3.org/) service and found it to have 579 errors. I also tested it with Bobby/WebXact (http://webxact.watchfire.com/) and it does not comply with all of the automatic and manual checkpoints of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

By the way, I tried to type in my web address in your contact form, and it doesn’t even give you enough room to do that….

I’ve tried to get them to change typos and mistakes on their site several times. I also sent them the new link for the Accelerated Reader lists like 2 months ago or something (?) It’s just so sad that their site is so bad. I wish someone would email me back, but I expect they won’t. I don’t think they even check their email….

Oh, I am so tired. I had a mega-busy day at work today. First, I finally discovered how to get the Scott Foresman online reading assessments working. So, I had to create classes for each grade level, enter in ALL the students’ names in the school in 1st - 5th grade, and create their user names and passwords. I started workijng on this two days ago I think. I finally finished up this afternoon. Also, I had many updates to the school website to work on: creating new daily activity pages, adding more On Demand instruction information, and a couple of ORQ’s (open response questions). Not only that, my room was a revolving door all day of 4th graders working on their portfolio pieces. The thing that exhausted me the most was trying to teach 2nd graders how to type using Microsoft Word. Yeah….

So as the world knows, Sanjaya didn’t get voted out last night. He didn’t even fall into the bottom three. :?: I am disturbed. :twisted: I don’t know what is wrong with America. Chris Sligh should have made it way beyond Sanjaya and Haley both. At least Blake is still there, safe and sound for now.
I’m going to watch Survivor in about 15 minutes. Survivor is getting pretty boring these days. Same old, same old. I still think they need to have a special Survivor where game show hosts compete. Like, Ryan Seacrest, Jeff Probst, Phil from The Amazing Race, and Julie Chen from Big Brother could all be on there. I think it would be funny.
The weather has been so nice lately! It’s 72 right now. I’ve been wearing skirts all this week. It’s felt great. It did pour down rain yesterday and the other night, but at least we didn’t get the bad severe weather that some places did.

I’m working on a header image, and I added a little “Random Comments” section over in the sidebar. I’ll probably make some pretty random comments there. Should be fun.
Tomorrow is Friday! Hooooo-ray!!