For my web review, I looked at the new Chicago Public Library site as well as Columbia College Chicago and Ann Arbor District Library. My first impression of Ann Arbor District Library is that it is a simple and uncluttered site. There is a long picture bar with changing pictures of the library along the top of the site. At the very top of the site is a navigation bar that has opportunities to view the site in several languages including Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Russian. I have not seen this option at any other library web site, and it tells me that Ann Arbor is very serious about reaching as many of its patrons as possible. There is another navigation bar which includes very easy to understand terms for searching the rest of the site. There is a lot of information that is one or two clicks off the main page. The remainder of the main page contains blogs about future events and this information is very up-to-date. One negative of the site is when I view using Firefox, there is some horizontal scroll necessary.

I choose to look at Columbia College Chicago because I assumed there might be some interesting creativity used on the site. While I was disappointed at the simplicity and uncluttered nature of the home page, it certainly works for the user. The color scheme is pleasant, not at all jarring, and works well with the uncluttered theme of the page. The top 2 navigation bars cater more to university related information, while the main page seems to cater more to library related information the student might need. There are 4 main categories on the main page including research, help, services, and about. These use very simplistic and user-friendly terms like “find books, find articles, find music, find movies”. Even as you navigate away from the home page, the 4 main categories are found on each page on the right side in their respective color bar. This allows the user to easily use the site without returning to the home page. Again the negative I came across had to do with using different browsers to view the site. For example, when using Internet Explorer I was unable to read the information at the very bottom of the page.

I contrasted these 2 library sites with the new Chicago Public Library Website. When I first viewed CPL website I was put off by the cluttered layout of the site as well as the color scheme which uses burgundy and several different shades of green including neon green. There are 2 positive attributes that I noticed on the home page. One is the ability to view the site either in Spanish or Polish, and the other is the ability to increase the text size. Since I had a difficult time viewing the home page, I navigated to a local branch using the Library Locater on the main page. There are several pieces of useful information in this page including a picture of the branch, address, phone number, hours of operation, map of area, up-coming events at this library, ability to search the catalog, plus children and teen programming. My suggestion to CPL would be to de-clutter the main page and provide only necessary information in a more simplified, streamlined manner. I would also like to see a more neural color scheme used with not so many different colors.