A tour of the new library website

A quieter library means that we can divert some of our attention to improving our virtual library services. Since November, we have been working on the library's new website. 

We recorded a tour of the site for the 2025 students and parents' virtual open house on March 4, 2021. It follows. The video is too long, we know, but just for the record, it was originally 26 minutes long. Halving that was a minor accomplishment.     

There were a number of reasons our old library website needed a complete overhaul.

• We needed to switch to responsive web design. Most of our web traffic visits our homepage to navigate from "the top navigation menu", which is comprised of a dozen "tiles" linking to instructional resources. On the legacy (old) website, this navigation menu failed to resize on mobile devices and led students to the wrong sites when they clicked on the right tile. Now, pages render well on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes (we think?).

• Much of the legacy (old) website information was migrated to the new district platform in 2016 by Senior Internship Program participants. What they migrated came from from our 2006-2016 iteration of our library website. The interns were charged with migration, not content revision, and thus some of the content on our legacy website was over 15 years old! To say this overhaul was overdue is an understatement.
• The web platform itself improved some of their navigation options and we wanted to take advantage of that. 
• Our legacy (old) website was cluttered. We wanted to streamline it. 

We want to give a shout out to Felice Russell, a graduate student in the Southern Connecticut State University library science graduate program. As a course assignment, she interviewed Ms. Sheehan and wrote up a case study of our library's instructional program. In the report, which she shared with us, there were several recommendations for a website update. It was clear from Felice's narrative that the content on our legacy website reflected an outdated version of our program. This was what prompted us to tackle the overhaul project. 

While we are pleased with what we have done so far, there is still plenty of room for improvement. At this point, we could use some guidance. We think that the new library website is responsive, simpler, cleaner, and easier to navigate, but we want to hear from our visitors, so we are inviting you to compare the old site to the new site and provide us with both warm and cool feedback. Simply click on images below to open both sites in new tabs.

Once you have compared the two websites, please feel free to complete the form below:

Thank you so much for you input!