This post is a website review of the Rebecca Crown Library, Dominican University.  I will use Columbia College, Chicago and the North Carolina State University Libraries websites as a comparison. 

The first thing I noticed about all three web sites is that none of the links changed colors after visiting a link.  This is the number 3 top mistakes in web design.  It makes for revisiting a page unintentionally highly like, and that is annoying.

Another common mistake was in regards to text sizing.  Only Columbia’s web site allowed the user to adjust text size.  And this was surprising.  Columbia’s text was the largest of the three to begin with.  And while Dominican’s web site had a lot more white space than NCSU (their site tries to cram too much stuff onto the front page) it would be nice if the size was adjustable.  This is top mistakes number 5.

On the plus for Dominican, and Columbia, was the use of bread crumbing.  This is when clicking through to pages from the homepage, a bar at the top of the screen tells the user where they are in the web sites hierarchy.

Another mistake for Dominican, and not Columbia or NCSU, is a link opening in a new browser.  This happens only when clicking on the catalog link, either Dominican’s or CARLI’s.  It is very annoying, and I am not sure why its only for the catalog link and not the other links, so besides being annoying, it is not uniform.  This is also one of the lessons that top ten web site design mistakes discusses.

The last mistake that I will address for Dominican is the fact that it looks like an advertisement for the school.  This is shameful!  Neither of the other two web sites that I looked at looked like this.  No library web site that I can think of has an apply for the school box or stories from past students in such a prominent position on the page.  This is what happens when a marketing department gets their paws on overall web site design. 

The last thing that I would like to address is the fact that Dominican Library has two homepages.  https://jicsweb1.dom.edu/ics/Library/ and http://www.dom.edu/library/ .  They are not at all uniform, and it makes reference work very difficult.  Walking someone through a process over the phone can be hard when they are looking at one homepage and you are looking at another.