dhcrusoe Posted February 18, 2009 Share Posted February 18, 2009 Hey all, You guys have contributed awesome thoughts in the past (e.g., to our sites http://www.codekindness.org and http://www.boolify.org), and now we have another free, public project/technology coming out. It's called "The Accomplished Librarian", and is designed to help individuals (librarians, for one) organize a wealth of link information into a much smaller footprint on their websites. How does it work? It's pretty simple: users build popup/embeddable librarians that consist of categories and containers. Each category can contain up to six containers, and each container can hold five links. The button can be embedded anywhere - in web pages, etc - although we're still working out some minor glitches. We'll have rating / commenting / top links functions working soon... And so... here's the site: http://www.theal.org -- would love your thoughts on the beta site, e.g.: * What do you like about the technology? * What could we do to make it simpler? * What could we do to make it even more useful? Thanks for your thoughts! --Dave http://www.plml.org Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nrg_alpha Posted February 18, 2009 Share Posted February 18, 2009 Well, aside from lack of page validation or css validation, there sin't terribly much to comment on. The one thing that immediately sticks out on the home page is that the GET LINKS ORGANIZED: sticks out beyond the 'content grid'. So it breaks the alignment of things somewhat. Speaking of alignment, it seems the main message is centered along with the logo / header.. it just feels odd to me. I would consider making the main message body the same width as the menu line. I'm thinking in terms of a grid.. as it is right now, this site's simple layout seems at quick glance 'broken' to me. If there were more uniformly lengthed sections, the information flows nicer for the eyes. Juts something to consider. Typically, elements like 'register' and 'forgot password' links appear along the top menu on the right hand side, accessible on every page as a result (at least, from what I have seen..) so I would perhaps consider something like that, as you have lots of space on the right hand side of the top nav menu to do this. I'm not sure about the overlay stuff when click on the get organized librarian button. On the one hand, its easy to close, thus returning to the page beneath it, but on the other hand, it feels disconnected from the rest of the site somehow. Can't comment on your About and View others links, as they currently do nothing. Overall, it is clean and simple. I think I would focus on unifying the look, feel and layout a bit more.. It just feels somewhat disjointed and slapped together IMO (all due respect of course). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dhcrusoe Posted February 18, 2009 Author Share Posted February 18, 2009 Hey there, Thanks for the comments! Yep, there's a LOT of design work to do. I'm going to spend the next week designing for clarity. As an overall concept, is there anything that would make this particularly useful to you / others? --Dave Well, aside from lack of page validation or css validation, there sin't terribly much to comment on. The one thing that immediately sticks out on the home page is that the GET LINKS ORGANIZED: sticks out beyond the 'content grid'. So it breaks the alignment of things somewhat. Speaking of alignment, it seems the main message is centered along with the logo / header.. it just feels odd to me. I would consider making the main message body the same width as the menu line. I'm thinking in terms of a grid.. as it is right now, this site's simple layout seems at quick glance 'broken' to me. If there were more uniformly lengthed sections, the information flows nicer for the eyes. Juts something to consider. Typically, elements like 'register' and 'forgot password' links appear along the top menu on the right hand side, accessible on every page as a result (at least, from what I have seen..) so I would perhaps consider something like that, as you have lots of space on the right hand side of the top nav menu to do this. I'm not sure about the overlay stuff when click on the get organized librarian button. On the one hand, its easy to close, thus returning to the page beneath it, but on the other hand, it feels disconnected from the rest of the site somehow. Can't comment on your About and View others links, as they currently do nothing. Overall, it is clean and simple. I think I would focus on unifying the look, feel and layout a bit more.. It just feels somewhat disjointed and slapped together IMO (all due respect of course). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nrg_alpha Posted February 19, 2009 Share Posted February 19, 2009 As an overall concept, is there anything that would make this particularly useful to you / others? The 'usefulness' of sites is highly subjective. Personally (and this is just my opinion...), I'm not into sites dedicated to libraries, educators and whatnot. But there is no doubt that your site here is targeted towards a specialized niche, and if geared properly, can be useful to them. I guess one thing you can do is network with such librarians / educators and ask them what kind of things they would find useful / engaging. If you can successfully tailor your site to their needs / wants, you're golden. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dhcrusoe Posted March 12, 2009 Author Share Posted March 12, 2009 Hey all, The site is still rough, but does the [Librarian] popup (located on the top right of this page) seem to work for everyone? http://www.plml.org/drupal/ We should have a beta release in about a week -- we're just tweaking a couple things on the main site (http://www.theal.org) before finalizing the page content. Thanks for all your help! --Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trq Posted March 13, 2009 Share Posted March 13, 2009 does the [Librarian] popup (located on the top right of this page) seem to work for everyone? If you want that youtube video stuck over the top of it then yes. Opera 9.64 [attachment deleted by admin] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dhcrusoe Posted March 24, 2009 Author Share Posted March 24, 2009 Thanks for your input, all! We've done a lot of work to the site, and are releasing a beta for testing... if anyone would like to check it out, here's the URL: http://theal.org/ and it would be great to hear any feedback, strengths or drawbacks... Thanks again, and cheers! --Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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