Our public website, a vital public access point to library services and resources, needed to be updated to respond to changing user needs. In 2000, our website had over 1.5 million visits. By 2013, that number had climbed to 19.3 million visits. During this time, not only had use of our website greatly increased, but broad changes in internet use and the explosion of digital resources and mobile technologies dramatically altered the ways in which people accessed and interacted with library services and staff. Our website had not been significantly changed or updated in almost ten years, so in October 2014 we launched a new public website to better meet the new and evolving needs, expectations, and devices of our patrons.

Usability principles guided our project and we engaged in a collaborative, iterative process shaped by ongoing dialogue with patrons and staff. We have created a user-friendly, responsive, and accessible website which we continue to improve through patron feedback, customer support, and user testing. Planning for the project began in 2013, with much of 2014 spent working directly with staff and community stakeholders to prepare for the change. We worked with staff across our organization, as well as with design and development firms, to develop a user-centered site that showcases library collections and services and positions us for future growth.

We developed our website by focusing on improving the user experience and increasing accessibility, informed by user-testing and customer feedback. Communication with patrons and staff, including ongoing user testing, continues to inspire our work. We offer and continue to develop several enhanced services including:

• Responsive design that automatically adjusts to mobile screen sizes
• Clean design and plain-language text to increase usability for people with varied skills and abilities
• Catalog integration into our public website
• Ability to search for and download ebooks directly from catalog
• More relevant search results that can be refined with facets
• Readers’ advisory suggestions included in catalog
• Modern design and keyword searching functionality to meet user expectations and increase ease-of-use.