Lincolnite: Lincoln's Online Community

Lincoln City Libraries has a new website.

http://www.lincolnlibraries.org/

As someone who hopes to work on Library websites in the future, I’m curious as to what you think (Mr Wilson, you may need to take off your web designer hat. )

I have a lot of thoughts, but I’ll save them for later.

ok....... go!

Holy gravy that’s ugly.

Whew, first impressions aren’t good. It’s not very attractive, but that’s pretty subjective. I don’t think the ugliness harms the site’s usability, so I won’t hold its aesthetics against it. I do have some other critiques:

It is under-styled. Default fonts, default colors, and default styles litter the site. Ugly or not, there is almost no “design” to the site.

Portions of the site are broken when viewed in Firefox, Opera, and Safari. The site’s developers did not do a good job testing the site before it went live.

The site jumps in and out of the base template. It’s very jarring for the user.

I’ll stop there for now. Karin, knowing your background, I am very interested in your opinions on this. If you are interested in writing up an article or blog post about it, I would love to put it here on Lincolnite (either as an “exclusive” or cross-posted on your site). Drop me a note (brent at lincolnite) if you’re interested.

Looks like someone ate a box of Crayons then vomited on the Web site.

I’d go to two columns, rather than three. The home page is too busy, I’m not sure where to look first.

They are packing a lot of things into the Web site, so I’m sure it’s a challenge.