Redesigning the Teen Web Site with the Drupal Content Management System
Samantha Thomason -- School Library Journal, 10/21/2009
The Central Rappahannock Regional Library (CRRL) in Virginia serves the City of Fredericksburg’s almost 290,000 residents as well as Stafford, Spotsylvania, and Westmoreland counties. Since 1999, we’ve had been using a homegrown content-management system to manage our six Web sites: LibraryPoint.org, AnswerPoint.org, KidsPoint.org, TeensPoint.org, HistoryPoint.org, and ArtsPoint.org. With a small Web staff and no full-time programmer, it’s been increasingly difficult for us to publish timely content and work on new projects. So in 2008, we started looking at content-management systems, particularly open source systems, to help us out.
We selected Drupal’s content-management system and began redesigning our sites. Though we didn’t survey teens about the new design, we consulted with the youth services staff and got their feedback. And on September 1, 2009, we launched Teens.LibraryPoint.org and response from our teens has been quite positive.
Drupal lets us manage our content and customize the look and feel of our sites much more quickly than before. The built-in capability for hosting multiple blogs has also been extremely useful. Our teen Blog is the heart of the teens’ home page, and thanks to Drupal’s system we can easily post timely content, whether it’s a book or a movie trailer, a library program promo, or reader’s advisory. We’re now showing interested library staffers how to blog and how to create their own book lists. We’re also very excited that our staff is now contributing more original content and we expect to attract many new contributors.
