The Blog Page can take me to the Library Homepage and College’s Homepage directly. Most parts are kept quite up-to-date. For example, April 22nd will be Earth Day, one of the postings which caught my eyes was titled “Celebrate Earth Day with C.O.D. 3D and the Library”.
All posts are categorized as different columns and archived chronologically by date. For example, users who are interested in film can quickly find out news from “Movie Mondays” which gives some detailed descriptive information about each film. In this way, when the post becomes old, a user still can retrieve it without inherent problems by using “Search blog posts”. The blog also provides an RSS feed, students and faculties are able to know new programs, events and knowledge from the updated news. Furthermore, if a user is very concerned about improving the blog, there is a place – “Your Suggestions & Comments” for any user to freely contribute his or her ideas. The blog’s layout is very simple and easy to follow for first time users. The blog is also searchable, and users are also invited to leave their comments or reviews.
However, some deficits exist on this blog page. The sidebar of “read a blog” is too tiny and buried among Library News, so it is difficult for a user who is not familiar with the library’s homepage to find it. I suggest listing library 2.0 tools in one place. This layout encourages the users who are specifically looking for library blog to try other social network tools such as Facebook, Delicious Bookmarks, Twitter and Flickr on the right down side of the library homepage. At the same time, the blog page should be designed with colorful tags so that it obviously appears to every user. In addition, this blog have no “About” on the blog page, so it is not clear for users to understand its goal or mission. With a few minor adjustments, I believe that this blog would be very easy-to-use.
