Chat Room-Tune Up Your Web Site

T. S. Eliot aside, September can be the cruelest month, particularly if you run the Web site for your library along with everything else you do. It's time to toss out the old stuff from last school year and update everything for this one. If you work for a public library, it's time to wipe away all traces of the summer reading program and let your users see all the cool activities you'll be presenting between now and the first of the new year. I know you're busy, so here are some useful tools that can make your Web site updating easier and more thorough.

Make your site accessible. If you haven't done it yet, visit Bobby at www.cast.org/bobby and run the pages of your site through it. Bobby is a service of the Center for Applied Special Technology that evaluates how accessible a site is for visitors with disabilities. I've run many library Web sites through Bobby and have been surprised at how often they don't pass. The biggest offenders seem to be graphics without attached "ALT" files and sites with frames (I give frames my thumbs-down, because they often make the Web harder to use for kids). Sites with colored and textured backgrounds often make pages hard to read, too, especially for users with lower reading levels and learning disabilities. White, light yellow, or beige—those colors most like a plain sheet of paper—make the best backgrounds. Every publicly funded site has a duty to be accessible to all the users in its community.

Shrink your photos. Photographs of people using the library, of librarians helping children, and of teachers working with classes put human faces on what many people view as only a room full of books. Visitors enjoy seeing photos, but they won't like it if those images take too long to download. It's great to use a digital camera and put your digital pictures up on your site. But pictures from today's generation of digital cameras are too big to be posted on your site without shrinking them (a good size for most library sites is about 250 x 360 pixels, about 3" x 4") and under 50K in file size. The NetMechanic site (www.netmechanic.com), a commercial Web site "tune-up" service, offers one very useful gizmo free to visitors: the GIFbot tool. You select a jpg or gif image and send it to GIFbot. You'll receive back a smaller photo that will load more quickly.

Check your links. How long has it been since you've made sure your links still go to sites you want your users to see? Web sites change constantly, and you should weed out sites that have changed into toads (or simply haven't been updated). I know of several sites, including one on homeschooling information and another on educational certification, whose domains were filched by porn sites. There are several link checkers available online; my favorite is Xenu LinkSleuth, available for free at home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html . LinkSleuth will go through the links on your pages, looking for ones that are broken. Don't depend on software to do all the work, though. You should look at every site you link to several times a year.

Add new sites. While you're checking the old links, add some spiffy new ones. If you're in a school, ask your teachers if they have any favorite sites on curriculum topics, and add them to the library site. Encourage teachers to use your library's Web site as a clearinghouse for sites they recommend. If you're a public librarian, open the circle wider—ask teachers and media specialists in all the schools you serve which sites they find most useful, and add them to your links lists. Find great new sites on your own, too, for topics in high demand, and let teachers and students you serve know about them. Our "Web Site Reviews " in SLJ recommend sites on common curriculum topics. Let me know if you're not finding topics there that you want to see.

Get good books to help you. Nobody knows better than a librarian that you won't find everything worthwhile online. Web guru Jakob Nielsen has a great site on Web design called The Alert Box (www.useit.com/alertbox), but his book Designing Web Usability (New Riders, 1999) is even better. Although the book is three years old—an eternity in Web time—Nielsen's design principles are sound and he writes well. Want to learn how to code Web pages? Try Elizabeth Castro's HTML 4 for the World Wide Web (Peachpit, 2000). Castro explains to even the most clueless how HTML works, and she can get you up and coding in no time.