Try This Tuesday

It’s Try This Tuesday time!  This week’s Try This builds off of last week’s, but this time the focus is on websites.  Try to keep an eye out for websites that you think are particularly well-done (and not necessarily from the library world).  Maybe you like a certain color scheme or design; maybe the writing or organization appeals to you.  You might also want to look out for sites that are directed at your target audience so that you can adopt some ideas.  Bookmark or save them in a “marketing favorites” folder so you can refer to them when you have the opportunity to change your site.

A couple that I like:

• The New York Public Library (What’s not to like?)


• Starbucks (Ditto.  Plus, nice organization by using color and graphics.  Does a good job of portraying the “feel” of the brick-and-mortar Starbucks).

You can also find ideas from just a feature or two of a site.  My colleague and I liked Western Kentucky University Libraries' Community Outreach feature and decided to do something similar (it’s not up yet).

You get the idea.  Your web presence is important for many obvious reasons and especially in terms of services marketing.  People look for evidence of service quality in lots of places, including our websites.  If the sites don’t look good, we don’t look good.  For a place to start, try checking in on KnowThis.com.  They offer a continually updated “Featured Brand Website” link to companies with innovative web ideas.  This time it’s Converse (very wacky, but worth looking at).