Volume 2, Number 12 |
TOTI Eric Rumsey
What should a library home page look like?
Unlike other areas of library operation, there is no pre-ordained standard for library web page design. What makes a good library home page design is a wide-open field with differing points of view. As I've looked at library Web sites over the past 2 to 3 years, I've been interested in how design trends have changed and evolved. While there is not yet anything
approaching a standard, the fact that it's so easy to see what other
libraries are doing means that design ideas have
been shared from one library to another. In
this article, I briefly discuss how library home page design has
evolved, and then present a design concept that's been emerging recently,
both in library circles, and over the Net in general. In what might be called the "first generation" of library home
pages, it was common to have the entire first screen of the page
taken up by a photograph of the library. This impulse
arose from the idea of the importance of "the library as a place."
The problem is that a large photo does little to draw the interest of
the user. An elementary principle of Web page design is that most
users are unlikely to scroll down past the first screen of a page. This makes it crucial to use "first screen real estate" effectively in order to
to attract interest. In "second generation" Web page design, the first screen was used
more effectively, by including links to other parts of the library Web
site. Typically, these are links to the secondary sections of the
site, with the links in a large font, and with descriptive
annotations underneath. For an example of this see our library's
former
home page, used from 1995 to 1997, and recently replaced . Since links are visible on the first screen this was an improvement in library Web page design. But, the use of non-linking text
annotations still takes up too much valuable first page real estate.
It doesn't give users what they really want which is LINKS! While surveying library home pages to
find ideas for a new design for our library's home
page, we found that several libraries use a design template that we
call the "tips of the iceberg" (TOTI) approach. We gave it this name because its purpose
is to show the user the "high spots" of the site, those points that lurk beneath
the surface. As in second generation design, the TOTI template
features 4-8 main headings, represented on the home page by large
text links. These links go to the separate sections of the site - i.e.
Library Services, Collections, Web Links, etc. Instead of having text annotations under the section links, as in
second generation design, in the TOTI design each large
section heading has under it a few links from the section, with no
additional description. These links may be hot links from the
section which are likely to draw the user's interest/attention. Or they may be
listed because they give the user some indication of what sorts of
things are listed in the section (thus serving both as description
and as links). The idea behind this design is that space on
the top of the home page is too valuable to be taken up by mere
description - Why not fit in as many links as possible? A nice touch,
often used with this design, is to have a link at the bottom of the
sub-section links, called something like "more," that links to the
main section page, thus reinforcing in the user's mind the idea that
the few sub-section links shown are only a small subset of what's
available in the section. Among libraries, the TOTI design is becoming common, especially on
medical and health science library home pages. Interestingly, after
finding it on those, I've noticed that several of the large
commercial search sites also use the TOTI design. And lest anyone
think that libraries have copied it from these "big guys in the
information world," I believe this is not the case! While I can't say just when
Yahoo, Excite, and Infoseek adopted the TOTI design, I use those tools
enough to know that it was not before the first library use of TOTI.
Correspondence with staff at libraries that use the TOTI design,
and from at least one example in the Swedish Archive, shows that the first library use
of TOTI was at least two years ago.
While acknowledging these caveats, however, I would maintain that there is a general trend toward the TOTI design, or at least toward a design that puts more links on the first screen of the home page. Certainly the fact that the large search services are adopting TOTI is an indication of its effectiveness!
Links
(Complete, updated list)
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Internet Trend Watch for Libraries is a publication of LEO: Librarians and Educators Online. All contents (c) 1997 by LEO. For information about LEO's services, visit our web site, call (617) 499-9676, or e-mail us at itw@leonline.com.
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