Card Sorting

I met with two coworkers today and drew up a list of categories and subcategories for a card sorting exercise at the next Website Team meeting. We've already done one exercise so I'm looking forward to this second attempt. After we try it out on the Website Team we plan to try it out on patrons.

I'm also reading a book called "CSS Mastery". Not even a little exciting, I'll tell you.

Catalog Search Widget Thingy

I implemented a Catalog Search Widget on PPLD's Catalog today. It's from Widgetbox. It allows you to install a Catalog Search Box on iGoogle, Blogger, Wordpress etc. There's one at the bottom of this blog.

I hope people use it.

Don't Make Me Think!

I read a rockin' book about web usability this weekend called Don't Make Me Think!, by Steve Krug. I found a handful of things I could implement immediately, and I'm excited about making an entire paradigm shift for the redesign. It was a real eye-opener. Especially the idea of making link names obvious and taking advantage of web conventions. Libraries are huge offenders on the link names.

I highly recommend this book to all web developers.

Fell off the face of the Earth

It's been awhile since I've posted anything. I have just finished the Teen Summer Reading website and am now going to devote my time to converting our scripted SQL statements to stored procedures. It's a big, tedious project.

Meanwhile, because I know the tedium will drive me crazy, I plan to continue my Drupal research and maybe set up a test site or two.

Our System Administrator spec'd a Linux box for this project. I'll have to double check with her to make sure it meets Drupal requirements, but I'm pretty sure that won't be a problem.

Song and Dance

We gave our little song and dance about Drupal to the website team yesterday. They are mostly convinced that this is the best way for us to go. Stage 2 is to continue reading the documentation and pursue my research and testing.

I must admit that it's a bit intimidating to learn not only Drupal but the technology that supports it. Right now we use Windows/IIS and VBScript/Html mostly, for Drupal we'll need to implement an Apache box and learn PHP/mySQL on top of learning Drupal and successfully planning and implementing a redesign. It's a daunting task, to say the least. But I feel confident in my abilities and my coworkers' abilities to do this.

Sidetracked

It's funny how I'm supposed to redesign the website on top of my regular duties.

Lately I've been converting scripted SQL statements to Stored Procedures and creating the Teen Summer Reading pages, among other things. I'm reading an actual print book on Drupal as well.

The Website Team meets this Thursday to review our findings on Drupal and make a decision about whether or not to use this CMS.

Consultants

We met with the consultant this morning and he pretty much reinforced what I already suspected Drupal would and wouldn't do for our website. There are many advantages of using this CMS, and of course a few disadvantages. I'm going to compile a report summarizing the meeting and listing pros and cons. Then we will report to the Website Team to make a decision. All of us felt that Drupal would be a good CMS for us to use.

One interesting thing that the consultant suggested was for us to switch the web server to an Linux environment. Right now we operate in a Windows environment and while Drupal works with Microsoft, it works better with Linux. My System Administrator is actually excited to learn about Linux, so I was glad for that. If we do decide on Drupal, we will use a Linux machine.