Website Feedback Wanted!

Interestingly, over the past few weeks there have been a few blogs posting about Lansing Library's website. (positive ones)

I'm working on a re-design right now, with a launch in September. To meet that deadline, I won't get to clean up all the code on the back end on all the pages, (so resist the urge to view source--LOL)

We've added SO MUCH CONTENT since the website began in 2001.
Back then we never could have imagined we'd have blogs, IM, online fine payment, online registration for programs, and 2 online newsletters.

We had too many requests for things to be linked from the home page, but as new things were added we wanted to promote it all.

It was time to put the whole website in a blender, pulse, and dump it out and build from scratch.

The old site was created in FrontPage, the new one in Notepad++ with new XHTML and CSS skills (thanks Prof. Steve for teaching something practical!!)

I've got the upper tier of pages pretty much complete except for meta & tracking codes. Gail's working on rewriting the youth & teen dept pages, so those will be updated before the launch.

Early staff criticism: they are not fond of the category "user tools." Does anybody have a better label for that section?

Compare the old with the new, and please comment!