School Library Website Design
- myblack2
- Apr 21, 2024
- 3 min read
My school website was created for a hypothetical school, Randon Middle School. While I do work in a SC public middle school and that experience informed a lot of the choices I made in regards to what I included, I do not run our library program or feel I have rights to create a website for our library. I chose to use Canva for this site because I am familiar with it, and it is easy to design with. I did, however, learn after creating this site that because myself and another student in this class work for the same school and under the same team that it wanted to link our designs for the URL. I was unable to publish my website, so I am sharing the public view link at this time.
I began the design process by taking the logo that I created earlier this semester for my hypothetical school and using school colors for the design. I then decided on the pages I wanted to include which are the following: Home, About, Meet the Librarian, Events, Educators, Reading Nook, and Parents. I used the logo on the home page which includes the mascot. Throughout the website I refer to the Randon Middle School Mighty Fox, because I think that mascots tend to encourage a sense of unity and familiarity. The About page was the last page that I added, because I wanted to make sure my voiceover video was large enough for people to easily see the slides and photos. I chose to do a slideshow through Canva because I wanted to show photos of the “students and activities” of my school and what our library was all about. I feel like the navigation of the website is simple enough with the tabs at the top that it did not require instruction in my voiceover.
On the Meet the Librarian page, I chose to link my Instagram and email to recognizable icons as points of contact. These links make it easy for students and parents to know where to access them without taking up a significant amount of valuable space on the page. The Events page I think is important especially if you plan to have a lot of big dates like a book fair, author speaking, or have a book return deadline, etc. Including the Educator’s page seemed necessary to include my Wakelet, and I was also able to include a Google form for signing up for a book club, and Calendly to reserve the mobile makerspace. These options have a considerable amount of use in schools in general, but especially the hub of a school like the library.
One of the key functions of a library past and present is to encourage literacy in our students, so the reading hub was my top priority. I was able to include a book talk I created for ISCI 757 which I think makes it fun and interactive. Since this is a hypothetical school I did not have a catalog to link to so I included a screen shot of the icon for Destiny that we use at our school with an explanation of how to search the database for materials and where you can find the app. I also thought it would be nice to include recommendations from a student because sometimes students will be more encouraged to read if it comes from a peer. I included a parents’ page because it is always nice to have volunteers and involved parents. Being able to have an online access to sign up through Calendly streamlines the process because they can see a live calendar of when help is needed. I also included a signup link for a hypothetical school Read-a-Thon, and to free tutoring resources because these are things involved parents would be glad to have access to.
Lastly, as I was creating the website I paid attention to having consistent font size that was large enough and had high enough contrast to make reading easier. As someone who has bad eyesight I appreciate larger font. I did go back and use the accessibility checker available through Canva as well. If I had had more time I would have included more resources for students and digital citizenship although some of the links on the Educator's page do address this. I would also have loved to include a link to the public library because it would create another way for students to check out e-books when school is out of session. I hope when I am running a school library of my own I can include all those things as they are all important for our students and their families.
Great work.