The Library Website: Working Toward a Better Tomorrow (Because Today Isn't There Yet)

I mentioned a while ago that the school's library no longer has a website - not even a basic portal where students could access the library's catalog. Obviously, this is no good for anyone who wants to use the library like a functioning information hub, not to mention that the school could really use a working library website for marketing purposes, so I've been working on an outline/sketch and now a mock-up in order to try to get something useful up and running.

Behold, a very unfinished beginning of a website!

It's still bare bones right now while I try to get content (or permission to write the content myself) from the administrators, but at least it links to the catalog and to our subscription to World Book Online, and has room to add specifics about what the students are doing right now and so forth. I'd like to also set up a citation hub, since learning to properly cite is such a big deal for the middle school students, and some connections to other community resources (public libraries, etc.) and online resources (WorldCat at least).

I used Wix to build the site; I did a few workshops with the diocese on Weebly, another WYSIWYG editor, but after testing both, I found Wix was a lot easier to navigate and use, and that Weebly didn't really have any tools that I preferred. I have built websites from scratch using HTML and CSS, but I'm not really a web designer or super fluent in things like Javascript, so in the interests of making sure the site is both attractive and useful, I decided to use third-party software.

The site's stuck on my Wix account address at the moment, but the school can pay to purchase a domain name for it, if they want to put that in the library's budget, or just link to it directly from the St. Leo school website and not bother with anyone visiting it directly. I do worry a bit about ease of transfer, since I may not be at this job forever and it would be good for the school to be able to easily transfer the site over the the new librarian to administer, so I created a separate Wix account from my personal one to make sure I could pass it on later.

As I'm looking over the year, I really wish I could have had a little more guidance from administration on this one; I seriously could not get anything out of them about what they wanted other than "the website should exist" and "I guess the catalog?" Oh, well... one of the issues of a tiny library in a tiny school!