Posted July 14, 2003.
New ALA Website Gets Some First Aid
The April 7 launch of the American Library Association’s retooled website produced a torrent of criticism for its poor usability and only a trickle of praise for its new look, despite the two years of staff and member input that went into vendor selection and design. Many complaints centered on the long and unwieldy URLs, poor search-engine performance, missing content, and the lack of automatic redirects from old site addresses.
Now, after talks with the Web Advisory Committee and representatives from ALA’s web-content vendor Active Matter, ALA Web Developer Debi Lewis has announced some improvements:
- Active Matter will rewrite its software to allow shorter web addresses and hopes to have the fixes in by September 1.
- Improvements in the speed and accuracy of the search engine are expected to be in place by July 14.
- Users linking to pages on ALA’s old site are now directed to an error page that allows them to search the new site for the content or visit the old site for an archived version.
- An improved, standardized feedback form for users to comment on the site will be in place by July 17.
A more detailed summary of these and ongoing improvements can be found at www.ala.org/webstatus/.
Posted July 14, 2003.