Work

Cedarburg Public Library (CPL) welcomes everyone and encourages the pursuit of knowledge, creativity and connection to people and ideas. Their mission emphasizes intellectual freedom and equal access, and they wanted a library website that would help all patrons and residents explore the library’s materials and their extensive events and programs. They have inventive content as well, including a radio station, a podcast and a world events series that brings in academics to help contextualize and explore what’s happening worldwide. As well, the city of Cedarburg boasts a rich history as an artist haven for plein air painters for over 130 years.

CPL needed a website that would showcase their programs and inventive content, but the site needed to be as unique as their community with an arts focus and strong service level. They also needed an events and event registration system with waitlists and management features, a space reservation system that automatically reserves spaces for events, along with an application form system for their community room.

Discovery

For CPL to be unique and represent their community best, we start by identifying their audiences and use cases, and it’s here that we find out what’s unique about their community and their needs. CPL worked with us to identify unique audiences along with the usual demographics-based audiences like kids and seniors, affinity based audiences like arts lovers and news buffs, and needs-based like career improvers and non-native English speakers. 

We did a content audit, along with a goals and search audit to identify content that exists or that needs to be created. With that, we put that content into pages in a series of themed site maps. We explore competitive themes in site mapping to find the most unique and relevant way to show the width and depth of the library. From there we wireframe the site’s primary, secondary, home and tool pages to explore content density, order, and hierarchy.

Design and Brand Exploration

Cedarburg is a unique city, and CPL helps host content about the city and arts, and hosts local artists’ work in a revolving gallery. In our design process, we explored the timeless artistic practice of plein air that served as a muse for one of the website's competing design ideas, infusing it with a sense of creativity, openness, and connection to the community. The plein air version was so perfect for the library that it helped us realize how much their brand needed to be updated. We worked with the original brand shapes and used colors to give depth and excitement to the brand that we found during our site design phase. 

We then explored accessibility features, including a full dark mode, low contrast and other visitor-chosen modes to make their experience the best possible, and different screen sizes and interfaces for tablets and phone and desktop. 

Features

CPL includes a lot of standard library features including event calendar, e-resources and blog posts, along with new features of podcast importing and various offsite tool embeds. We wanted a cohesive style with all parts of the site, so we worked through styles to make sure even embeds felt part of the site. We also designed interfaces to their custom room reservations system, and created a touch-screen version of the reservations system on a tablet that stands near the study room spaces.

CPL also includes a more integrated hours and holidays system in the header and footer, and an emergency message system, rounding out the header with the most useful operations information. We also created a grouped search system that helps contextualize the results as events, blog posts, pages or e-resources.

Results

Because of our unique process to bring out the library’s personality, the CPL website fits perfectly into the iconic city of art. It’s also a perfect canvas to communicate with patrons, residents and visitors, and the design promotes visitors’ exploration and has strong accessibility to connect with more people. 

As well, because of their library-focused content management system, changes and new content are easy and more staff are creating valuable content. More and better content means that the site’s relevancy with search engines has improved, and we’re seeing consistent visitor increases year over year, along with a consistently low bounce rate.