Case studies comments

Some comments on the case studies: 

Darien Library

It’s great to have feeds divided into nice, specific categories, but not too many of them either. The music and movies feed is nicely laid out with consistently-sized entries. The front desk blog is a little long-winded. As many of this week’s writers explain, brevity is important on the web (and I will try to remember this – I guess everyone has heard that Pascal quote before…)

Garfield Public Library - Library Lounge

I think there needs to be a clear “about me” near the top of this page, for accountability and to make sense of the site and its content. Also, there needs to be a rule about how many categories can be used before their purpose is defeated – I’d say around 7 or 8.

VCU Libraries

This isn’t a site I’d really want to have an RSS feed for (unless I were managing the library), but it has a select purpose which it fulfills. This is a good way for patrons to see that the library really does listen to their complaints, and the creators have done a good job of creating a reasonably-sized list of categories.

Game Blog

As Nielson says, headlines should tell you clearly what to expect if you keep reading. The same is true for categories. Huh? doesn’t say  much, but is not intriguing enough for me to want to find out more. Perhaps if I were a gamer I’d understand.

Mabryonline.org

It’s nice that this page opens up with some introductory material, explaining how to use the blogs, instead of just the latest random post. Although a lot of blogs use the same software and therefore look a lot alike, it is still sometimes like opening up a book in which all of the features – title, paragraphs, page number etc. have been shuffled around in an unusual way and it takes a moment to figure out what's what..

Plymouth State University

Wow, I clicked on the first news item and found harldy any news but a million things to deal with, feeds, tags, bookmarks, links. It doesn’t look, from the tags box, as though students are actually making use of all of these features either. This blog feels a bit inside-out, where we see the structure but no content. It’s also always nice to have a “next” option, instead of having to click back to the main page. It is amazing how much energy it takes to click…so users shouldn't be made to do it unnecessarily