I’m going to be designing a new site for the library I work for over the next few months. We currently host almost all of our library pages on LibGuides. I’ve gotten around the lack of native site navigation in LibGuides by creating a home-brewed tabbed navigation system in the header area. It’s worked very nicely for about 2 years, but the times they are a changing. Two factors are coming together that are driving this change.

First, we will need to move our content to a brand new platform called LibGuides 2. This has a bunch of new CMS functionality that I’m looking forward to but, from a design point of view, the biggest change is that the public-facing side will be using the responsive Bootstrap 3 framework. I’ve wanted to have our site be responsive for a long time (LibGuides 1 is fixed width, with a kind of funky mobile view alternative), but this change will cause our existing tabbed navigation (which relies on the fixed layout) to break. So, I’m getting up to speed with Bootstrap and Less (which is the CSS pre-processor that Bootstrap uses) and beginning to sketch out some rough design ideas.

Second, the College hired a designer to redesign the main campus web site. Last week, I attended a meeting (along with a roomful of other campus web stakeholders) hosted by the design company and the VP of marketing for the campus where they unveiled Photoshop design comps that will inform the coding design. Just a couple of days ago, the design company pushed out a style guide (again using Photoshop comps) showing color and font choices. This was very good timing for me since now I have a sense of how I can make the library redesign work mirror that of the College redesign effort.

So, my intention is to share details about what aspects of the Library redesign will be informed by the campus work and what will necessarily have to be done differently. The purpose of the two sites is different (I may touch on why we no longer host the Library site on the College server as I go forward), but the nutshell is the College sees the main purpose of its site to be Recruitment and Marketing, whereas the Library site is all about Instruction and Research. The two sites have completely different (and conflicting) functional requirements regarding branding, typographic choices, site navigation, and wayfinding, just to name a few.

Enough for now. I hope to post a couple of times a week as I get rolling.