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Anyone familiar with what the corporate world amusingly calls "online customer service" knows the frustration. If you go to a corporation's Web site looking for a straight answer to a particular question, you can get lost easily, floundering around in many lengthy professionally designed pages that burble happily about the virtues of their products. Or you can find the help page about how the ZX-40 model conflicts with the Winko 3000 DVD driver, but unfortunately you have the ZX-15 model and you don't own a DVD drive. But you keep seeing a blinking red light when you click the mouse, and your ZX-15 doesn't work when it does, and they don't mention that phenomenon anywhere.

You give up searching for the answer. You snort and grumble to yourself and your colleagues. But most of us often don't notice what a poor job we do on our own Web sites.

Library sites are often less than forthcoming with the information you need if you're, say, a new parent in the area looking for a storytime schedule. A few examples? Well, to protect the guilty I won't name names, but I visited the home page of the public library of a well-known mid-Atlantic coastal city, and nowhere on that page did I see a link to children's services. Even digging into the site by blind instinct, I found no more than a sentence or two that inadequately described services available to kids, YAs, or families. Another nicely designed home page for the library of a large midwestern city offers the following options: "The Library Catalog," "Databases & Links Library," "Library Locations & Information," "Library Events Calendar," "The Reading Room," and "Exhibit Hall." Huh? Is the Exhibit Hall more important than children's or YA services? When you click on "Library Locations & Information," the logical next choice, you still don't see the word "children" or "youth" anywhere. This isn't user-friendly Web design.

I visited the home pages of 10 Illinois elementary schools I chose at random. None had a direct link to the library from the home page. Only one of them actually had a library page--one that was last updated in 1998.

I also visited the home pages of 10 California high schools, trying to find information about their libraries. More than half the schools, while clearly linking the way to sports teams and academic departments, neglected to include the word "library" anywhere that I could find. Only three of them had full-blown, resource-heavy library pages, and only two of these included the name of, and a way to contact, the librarian.

The best kind of Web design enables visitors to find what they want in three clicks. I ask every school and public librarian: Go to your library site and try to find out about what you do. How easy is it to find the library (if you're in a school) or the young people's department (if you're in a public library)? How easy is it to find specific bits of information, such as upcoming events or storytimes? Can you find out about the important things you (the librarian) do?

And does the site list your name and phone number, as well as an e-mail link? Some librarians, particularly those who work with the general public, shy away from the idea of having their names "out there" on the Web. But we should recall that many other canny professionals--physicians, nurse practitioners, attorneys, psychologists, social workers--have their names, contact information, and facts about what they do available online. In an age when librarians need to stand out as professionals and demonstrate their value to the community, it's important that your community--in most cases the people who pay your salary--has a way to reach you easily.