Westlake Porter Public Library
Submitted by Leo Klein on Mon, 12/01/2008 - 14:55.
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Westlake Porter Public LibraryNice example of a Drupal site, this one from the Westlake Porter Public Library in Ohio.
Sorry, but it's a cluttered format and the databases are lost...and I am not just saying this out of urban bitterness, because Westlake's pricey physical library looks like a suburban Taj Mahal... The calendar features are cool, but it's not an open source product. It is powered by Evanced.
Too much detail on the page so you can't really find anything.
It's not overwhelming, to my mind. It's hard to find the perfect balance between the need to put everything on the front page to get patron eyes and not being overwhelming. If you want cluttered, you should see the Dublin libraries pageflakes homepage that was the flavor of the month earlier this year, before pageflakes started to su**. It had about 50 widgets in one screen, and tended to give me vertigo and anxiety from looking at it.
I really like the banner/navigation. The overall design and colors for this area are great. I agree with other comments about the over all congestion of the site. The width is set at 770px and I think it could be widened somewhere between 800 - 900px. This create more side margin white space.
Also, the mood created in the website with a gray page background and then pastel sidebar area just doesn't work. I would recommend pulling in a lighter shade of blue to match the excellent color scheme in the banner area for the sidebars and the main content header backgrounds (or just used blue in your header fonts) to create a continuity.
One last note, I do like the idea of the main content area, but it needs more unity in fonts.
Hope my first post here isn't too harsh! I really appreciate this blog and all of the library sites posted on here.