Library Websites

After Googling school library weebly sites I found a few that I thought had great attributes. One of the sites was http://freemanlibrary.weebly.com/. It was very simple with a great picture collage and many useful links at the top that are accessible using the drop down menus. The online catalog, databases, Easybib, and eBooks are all linked in very simple circles above a picture collage of library happenings. There are lessons, electronic resources, suggested reading, about us, and homework help. A cool feature I found was in the suggested reading drop down there was one, “What Our Teachers Read As Teens”. It has their picture with a book and some of them are making great faces and showing some humor through their photo. If you click on it the book title and author are listed as well. Students love looking at pictures and the way these are displayed in thumbnails is a great idea.

Another site I found was http://lowelibrary.weebly.com/. The home page was on the long side and somewhat cluttered once you scrolled down but, there was great content. There was also a Google form on the home page that asked for suggestions of new library books. You would have to put in your name, teacher’s name, title of the book, author’s name, and click the submit button. I’m assuming this form would get sent to the librarian’s drive where they would have all kinds of suggestions from students. I absolutely love this idea! There’s also a breaking news section and students photos in a slideshow. The drop down menus at the top making accessing information relatively easy. There is certainly a wealth of information on this website. You could spend lots of time going through all of the features that have been included. The video on how to use the library catalog was very useful as well.

Many library sites are also district templates that have library information on them or blogs that are very popular in the library world. I would like to use WordPress for my website because I already have my blog created there and I would like to follow the same format and have the two linked within the same template so they have a similar look and feel. I will tell you though it isn’t easy! Learning how to edit widgets, change pictures using coding, and navigational issues are making this quite frustrating. I have created a Weebly in the past and used it with students as well. I have found it fairly simple to use and if you know a little html coding you can add some extra elements without too much pain. I have explored Wix, Smore, and Google Sites. I really like the templates available in Wix. They seem to be very neat, clean, and organized. Smore is used at my school to send newsletters to staff. I have found that Google Sites needs some fine tuning. I haven’t explored it in depth but, the sites that I have seen using this platform don’t have that same eye appealing design that is available in Wix.