Visit the new Singapore Public Library website first.

The Good

1. The Existence of 3 different libraries is now clear. I had no idea we had 3 different kinds of libraries.
2. Elimination of the drop down menu is an excellent idea. The disappearance of bread crumbs however is not so nice. It gave me a location in the website where I was in any page.
3. Didn’t even know the existence of GoLibrary, but now thanks to the effective left navigation pane, I know about it and can even go to events listed there (this event is especially appealing).
4. Very glad to have the Simple Homepage. Yay!

The Bad

1. Not sure where I am in the site (no “active” links to show where I am now on a page). Even when I click on one of the top 4 main navs (e.g. “Just Ask”)
2. Good idea to put the feeds and blogs in the main nav. But feeds list is not showing the links to the actual blogs/pages. I would like to see the content of each blog/page so that I know if I would like to subscribe to them or not.
3. Just share is a new feature and it is not highlighted. Rather it could be marked with a “new” so that people know that it is a new feature and take steps to find out about it.
4. Titles for NLB Blogs list do not link to the blogs themselves. Only the image on the left does. I think people are most likely to click the text themselves rather than the image on the left (which frankly looks more like a bullet point than a representative icon of that blog). Even the link URL itself is not SEO friendly nor memorable (or intuitive).
5. The blog library@esplanade is listing a downloadable link with the list of new arrivals, but would it not be better to integrate it with the existing list of arrivals for the entire Public Library (in a HTML page)? As a user, I dont want to download and then look for items to borrow. I would rather do it in one shot.
6. Each page is titled Public Library, Singapore. That just simply sucks. With 4 tabs open all I can see is “Public Library, Singapore” on all tabs, and dont know which page I am exactly on! Again, really bad for SEO too!
7. JUST BROWSE - the very phrase brings up an image of a catalog to browse. But apparently it is supposed to hold any info about the library and stands for “browsing the site” rather than “browing the catalog”. Since it is a library site, everyone is bound to consider the later than “browsing the site”.
8. The submit button for logging in to check your account at the simple home page is woefully small. If there are elder users to the site, they will definitely have a hard time figuring out where the submit button is and actually clicking it.

The Ugly

1. No compliance to standards! The site fails validation for HTML 4.01 Strict.
2. No accessibility for blind or handicapped users. I doubt if it even passes Singapore’s own accessibility standards as laid out in WIS guidelines. For a start, none of the links in the main nav and side nav have any alternate attribute set. It does not even pass the A level accessibility compliance based on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (type in “http://pl.sg” here and check for A level compliance). That is a big FAIL for any public service website. What is “public service” if it is not accessible to a percentage of the population (however small)?

On the whole, I find the redesign a step in the right direction and given the huge amount of data that must have been ported, it must have been a humongous task. But it is woefully lacking in some basic standards that any public service website should pass at the minimum.