American Library Association

Founded in 1876, the American Library Association was created to provide leadership for the development, promotion, and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all. Their large  and diverse organization is populated with numerous subdivisions, offices, roundtables, and committees, each with their area of specialization and distinct focus. The website reflects both the organization’s individuality and overarching purpose.

Goals

The goals for updating the site included:

• Migrate existing content to Serena Collage.
• Implement usability and functionality changes that would streamline not only the main page, but their many sub-sites.

Results

Duo created a tutorial and template by which all divisions could update their sections, and implemented the build that resulted in their redesign. This resulted in the following overall improvements, while retaining the spirit of a large and varied organization.

• Usability and Information Architecture: The new shell affected thousands of pages: they were restructured and freed of clutter, simplified without losing information. This increased not only visual appeal, but accessibility: video transcripts and a host of other features brought the website up to handicapped standards. Interactive content, Flash animation, and visible news updates increased interest and relevancy to site visitors,

• Sections: This began with the main page, and sub-sections followed suit, retaining their individual elements while increasing functionality from both the back and front end.

• Administration: Throughout the integration and even more so following it, ALA was able to better control the vast majority of their content, and could be collaboratively involved in the daily management of their site. The new import process accommodated their frequent updates and high traffic, allowing for more seamless pushes of content.

From the proof of concept in January 2006, Duo Consulting’s migration of ALA content to Collage took about 2 years. Their redesign coincided with this move, their desire for a new look and feel overlapping with the need for workflow and a new way to manage content.

This site was built using Serena Collage, a web management solution that helps companies manage their web sites by exporting content and code to provide scalable control.

 

 

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