Idea for post: What the director is reading

Date March 20, 2007

P.J. Capps, director of the Atchison Public Library has a great post on her KLOW site entitled “What the Library Director is Reading.” What a great way to get the community involved! She’s got a lively conversation going with her patrons about what she’s reading and what they are reading.

What other kinds of posts really get your patrons going?

Category Posted in Great Idea! Comments No Comments »

New way to do photos in a text widget!

Date March 20, 2007

Corning City Library has a really great photo slideshow in their sidebar that they created using an online service called RockYou. To create this, you would go to RockYou and click “Create Slideshow.” From there, just follow the directions, then when it gives you some code, paste that into a text widget and put it on your sidebar. Easy, and pretty neat looking.

Here’s an example:

Good find, Corning!

Category Posted in Great Idea! Comments 2 Comments »

Picking Wordpress Themes for KLOW

Date February 9, 2007

Finding the right visual look for your website can be a challenge. Fortunately, there are many sites that host Wordpress themes that are compatible with our system here. A few key words to look for when you are looking at a theme:

  • Widget ready - so you can drag and drop your widgets!
  • Wordpress 2.0+ compatible (we’re using Wordpress 2.0/2.1)
  • Available in a .zip file
  • Look for themes that aren’t too thematic or artistic. Sometimes it’s quite challenging to modify a theme to your specifications when it is very graphic intensive.
  • Stick to familiar layouts, 2, 3 and 4 column layouts all seem to work very well with not too much fuss.

Some sites to consider when looking at themess:

http://widgets.wordpress.com - features themes that are widget ready

http://www.wpdesigner.com - he tries to do a theme a day, and some are very good.

http://themes.wordpress.net - lets you search on particular criteria, such as color, widget ready, prominent colors, etc.

Have Fun!

Category Posted in FYI, Handy Tips Comments No Comments »

Photos in Posts

Date January 31, 2007

Nobody likes to wait for photos to download on a website, so if you’re uploading photos that are directly from your digital camera, likely they are pretty huge and will take a long time to download. There’s an easy way around this — resize them!

I found a handy online tool that will let you easily shrink those files down to a more manageable size both for you to upload and for your patrons to download.

Read the rest of this entry »

Category Posted in FYI Comments 4 Comments »

Keep it fresh!

Date December 11, 2006

How do you keep people interested in your site? Fresh content!

I have heard varying opinions about the minimum frequency for new posts. Some people think you should add new content every day. I, however, think that if a rural library is adding new content once per week, that’s great!

What types of content are KLOW libraries posting?

  • Event announcements (story time, movie nights, library board meetings, etc)
  • New arrivals (books, DVDs, music)
  • Services and resources (Homework Kansas, Kansas Audio Books, Music, and More, etc)
  • Library announcements regarding holiday closings and weather closings, too

What else? How do you keep patrons coming back to your site?

Category Posted in Great Idea! Comments 1 Comment »

Next Entries »