My name is Jennifer Peterson and I'm going to be helping to moderate today's session and I'm really excited to get it started here. I'm going to begin our recording. And I would like to start by welcoming our presenters for today who come from the Berthoud community library district in Colorado. And now, Sara Wright has a brand-new job at the Colorado library consortium as the northeast regional consultant. So I would like to welcome Elizabeth Lawrence and Sara Wright to our webinar today and I'll pass it on over to you. Welcome! >> Be sure to unmute yourself, Elizabeth. >> Yes, that was a very good tip. So right from the start here, you can see that you are listening to a webinar put on by very non-technical people. Now, Elizabeth is much more technical than me, this is Sara Wright speaking and as Jennifer mentioned up until about a month ago, I was the director here at Berthoud community library district and one of the first things we would really like to do today is to give credit to the Colorado state library, because through the years, they have given us the tools and the technical support that we needed in order to provide a usable and attractive website to our community. We have no dedicated IT staff has many small and rural libraries do not either and that has just been key for us. And they've provided that support first with the platform, and then most recently with the migration to the WordPress platform. And again, I really want to stress, we do not have dedicated IT staff. I can't even remember to unmute my microphone. But together, Elizabeth and I through the years have really brought our website up to something that we're truly, truly proud of. Please be kind if you go look at our website. I do want to give a little disclaimer that our content is still a work in progress. For instance, in 2016, one of our goals is to improve our readers advisory content but we've come a long way. And to show you that, one of the first things we're going to do today is give you a real brief tour of the evolution of our website. We felt that was important just to show you how far, with just a library director and a much more technically minded staff member, you can bring your website, all by yourself. And with that, I would like to introduce Elizabeth Lawrence. She is in charge of circulation and public services here at the library but we also fondly refer to her as our library ninja because she is capable of providing sometimes simultaneously a plethora of services and assistance to patrons and she does it with grace and enthusiasm. So with that, Elizabeth! >> Thank you very much, Sara, for the introduction. So as Sara mentioned, we are going to give you a brief history on the evolution of our site. And one of the reasons why we really want to do that is to show you what an ongoing learning process this was for us. There wasn't a great big revelation moment when we went to WordPress and everything clicked and looked awesome and, all of a sudden, I was a website guru. It was a journey, and it's still a journey and I'm still constantly learning how to better present ourselves online, and I think looking back at our past website and learning from them is extremely valuable, especially when you're determining your goals for your future website. So to start us off with, this is the home page for our library's very first website. We had this prom 2004 to 2008. As you can see, it's very plain and very straightforward. There's not a whole lot going on here. The first website was built by a volunteer. It was very simple, there was little room for confusion in navigating the site and it provided the necessary information. We had our hours, our phone number, our location. So the site itself did serve our purposes. However, the site lacked good graphics, the fonts and color schemes were not consistent which made it very difficult to follow visually, it lacked a streamlined professional look. We were not able to connect to our catalog and staff didn't have easy access to the site's log-in so it was basically treated as a static site. From the time it was created until our migration, it never changed. What you see there stayed there as it was. >> But again, thanks to the wonderful folks, specifically Kieran Hixon at the Colorado state library, in 2008, we were able to hugely improve our website by using the platform. It's a platform that's used by many states around the country and it standards for public library Internet kit and this really was our first truly functional website. >> So if I see the home page -- this is the home page for our Plinkit site. Are you unmuted? There we go. There we go. So this is the home page for our Plinkit site. You can immediately see the improvement. The tabs made navigation easy, colorful images made it visually pleasing. If you look on the top right there you can see we had a way to connect our website with our social networks which was a great big plus for us. The Plinkit site was prebuilt. We don't have designated IT staff to build sites from the ground up. With the help of the Colorado state library we could now fill in the blanks of this template and we could control not only the basic layout of the website but we could also customize our color schemes, we could add or remove graphics to the site, we could now add events to a calendar that was available online. The site was a great improvement from what we had started off with but we were still experiencing limitations. Our photo album was tricky to populate and the site was difficult to administer from the staff's perspective. If I pressed the wrong button, I risked breaking that page that I was working on and there was no undo button. >> And here we are in the 21st century finally with our beautiful WordPress website. In early 2014, again, the Colorado state library provided us with the opportunity and the assistance to move to the WordPress platform and this was really exciting for us. So one of the first things that we did, of course, was, you know, sit down and plan and talk about okay we have this great opportunity. How do we want to make the most of it? Well, one of the things we did not do very well from the beginning was to clean up the old site for migrating all of your information to the new one. We actually found after we migrated it that it was really just easier to just scrub everything and just reenter all of our information. So that's a caution. We didn't do a very good job of that. But it might have made our life a lot easier. But what we did do a good job of and what we did really focus on was what we wanted the website to convey about our library as an organization. Our personality and our values. You know, there's no shortage of content. As librarians, we don't have a problem with finding content, but, you know, we wanted to take a step back and look at all kinds of websites, not just other libraries', and really use this as a way to show the community online who we are as an organization. So we decided we, of course, wanted it because it reflected our values to be fun and engaging and definitely to be, you know, easy to navigate, of course, and again, as librarians we've got lots and lots of stuff to share, and it's really good stuff but it doesn't have to all be on the home page. So we wanted to keep that very, very simple. And another thing we wanted to do with our website was to show the importance of people, both our patrons in our community and our staff. You know, I believe that, you know, staff is one of the most important resources that a library has. You can have all the greatest books and databases and all the greatest stuff in the world but if you don't have the right staff, all that other stuff is really not worth a lot. So one of the ways we did this on our website was to have a staff bio page and that's something when we were reviewing other places, peoples' websites, that we noticed that there's literally quite often no mention of staff at all. And we felt that was really something important for us. Another area that we looked at was how the website works as part of our entire online presence, so that each product and platform that we used, we used its unique capabilities and we weren't duplicating content. So, for instance, your website is where you have most of your content, and it's your portal to your other social network platforms. Facebook, we use for current events, sharing fun and interesting information and information that's maybe a little more ephemeral. And then we use our Pinterest page really just to delight and inspire with pictures of library events, of course, but then we also have a board that's just about loving bacon because that's one of the things that reflects the personality of our staff here. So with that being said, Elizabeth now is going to tell you a little bit more about, you know, actually using WordPress. And I'm going to remember to mute myself. >> So because of its ease of use, WordPress allowed us to focus more on the personality of the website and our online presence as Sara mentioned. It is such an intuitive platform to use we can now really invest our time and effort into creating a website that reflected who we are as a library. The template that we chose is called mantra if anybody's curious and one of the main reasons why we chose that particular template is the front page slide that rotates a series of photos along with captions, and it's very easy to change, you can add links to it that redirect patrons to another part of the website which would offer more information, you can redirect it to the calendar. I've had photos link to our Facebook page, as well. The mantra theme is also a responsive theme which makes it a great theme for your mobile users. In establishing our library's online presence, we wanted our website to be more than just a page with our hours and phone number. We wanted it to express our character and desire to serve the community. We are customer service and family oriented. So having a website that reflected that was very important to us. One of the things -- our website is visually friendly and easy to use and navigate, having the theme that was responsive as well as being interactive helped achieve that goal, as well. Our fonts are all the same and I might say in jest that no comic sans allowed and the reason I say that is you want a font that is going to be easy to follow visually, it's going to look professional, we originally had a serif font, it was a times new Roman based and we segued into what you see now. So first our website had a dark purple background, deeper green hues and over time we changed to using colors as a highlight and began using lighter colors and it was a lot of fun at first to go crazy and make the site pop with all of these brand-new colors that we now had access to and could change but the color itself was not meant to be the focus. The content itself was meant to be the focus and our colors were starting to draw attention away from the content. So that's something that we changed, as we received patron feedback. Having good quality images over quantity of images was and still is very important to us, apart from the home page, you might only see one single image on a page, but the image is not pixilated, it's not washed out and it's not blurry. Making sure the catalog was easily accessible is also a top priority for us. And this is why it was given its own pad at the top of the website in addition to the link on the home page. WordPress has also allowed for better promotion of our social networks. As Sara mentioned before, our site as it's developed, we've really strived to better utilize the strengths of each individual network to highlight the different aspects of the library. Before WordPress, we also didn't really have a way to properly highlight our friends at the library so we took this new opportunity to give them a designated tab on the home page as well as making sure their page had a nice image that really shows what their funding does for the library and the community. And yes, our library account, we have a catalog link and they can log in with their account. I see the question in the chat box. They can renew books and place holds on their items, as well. Because we have so many great programs available to our patrons, we really wanted to have a calendar that was easy for them to view for our patrons' perspective. We also wanted to choose a calendar that was easy to populate from the staff's perspective. I chose google calendars, google makes it extremely easy to embed this calendar right onto your website's page and I can easily edit the calendar from my Gmail account, which is a really, really nice feature. So as Sara mentioned, one of the fun ways we decided to show off our library was with our staff biographies. This is something that you might see on websites, but you might not necessarily see them on library websites. And we wanted to do something a little different. We feel like it really shows off the fun side of our library and it creates a unique relationship with the community. I think it's also fun as a staff member to show our patrons who we are outside of the library and what our hobbies and our interests are. So talking a little bit about the back end of WordPress, it is again such an intuitive platform, a non-IT person, such as myself, can easily edit it and keep it up to date and I know we've stressed the non-IT-ness of our staff several times but we want to convey how simple it can be to have a nice, professional-looking website using WordPress. WordPress offers so many standard features to make your experience as streamlined as possible, maintaining the website is really not that unpleasant of a task. It's very easy. You have the option for weekly backups, so if something terrible happens, you are able to pull from your latest backup. You also have a huge variety of plug-ins to choose from, and this can enhance your experience and your patrons' experience using WordPress. Some of the plug-ins that we use on our site, we've stat viewer for our online stats, we have an online PDF viewer and we do have a broken link checker and that was extremely useful for when we were first migrating from Plinkit. Another plug-in that we use and I highly recommend for anybody who's using WordPress is ithemes. It's a security plug-in and they offer free online courses for making sure your website is as secure as possible. The plug-in actually helped us discover, it helped us to discover one of the reasons why our website was getting -- we were getting thousands of web hits and it wasn't accurate considering the size of our community. So it was listing all of these URLs that were being visited and we realized that a bought had been hitting all of these old links repeatedly and that's why we were getting this insanely huge website, our statistics were just -- it was thousands and thousands. So it actually allowed us to blacklist all of those IP addresses, so the bots were no longer able to start -- they were no longer infiltrating our website and you can also set specifications for blocking attempted fraudulent lock-ins with iThemes, as well. So using the plug-ins themselves is very simple. Installing them is really easy. On your dashboard, you have a plug-in tab and once directed, you can look up the plug-ins by key word or sort them by rating, recommended or featured settings, all the plug-ins have a rating and that's a good indication of the quality of the plug-in itself. Oh, I am so sorry. Thank you very much, Sara. It's iThemes and definitely take a look at the iThemes plug-in if you get a chance if you're looking towards WordPress. Again, their online courses are really easy, they're great for beginners. They have some really good standard basic guidelines. That might seem simple at first, but really, they're the foundation for making sure your website is secure. Okey-dokey. I know this is a caricaturized example of what we wanted to avoid for our website but there are some good tips that we can take from it. This used to be an actual website and many of those graphics on the website are blinking and flashing, and it's really a perfect recipe for a migraine. You can see multiple fonts on this site, you can see colors, clashing colors, neon colors, bad graphics, too many graphics, really there's too much going on here. And the reason why we use this particular website as an example is because as a library, we really have to be mindful of the quality of content we provide versus the quantity of content that we provide on the website. We have enough content to provide patrons pages and pages and pages of information and it's always a challenge finding the balance between providing what they need or overloading them with so much information they can't find anything at all. It's like the '90s threw up, I like that. So we've mentioned Kieran before, as we took on the new site, any time I had a question or a concern he was always quick to help. He always answered my e-mails just right smack-dab, fast responses, it was great. He offered suggestions and without his support and encouragement we would not have had near as pleasant of an experience as we did. We also took a lot of visual cues from library and non-library websites and something I really encourage is for you to look at other non-library websites, don't be afraid to draw inspiration from all different kinds of websites. Oftentimes, you'll see things that you don't like but that can help solidify in your mind what you do like. We also relied on our patrons' feedback. Their questions, comments, sometimes complaints, actually it really helped us to develop the website into what we have today. And I know this list is small and while we wanted all the help that we could get, WordPress really made our desire to create a professional, friendly, easy to use website, it was very simple. And with the incredible support from Colorado state library from Kieran, we had a willingness to try. There were a plethora of free resources available to us and this allowed us to put together a website without the help of a professional graphic artist or a web designer. >> Good, simple overview of usability issues for website design. And Elizabeth does all the photo editing and she uses only free photo software and she likes Pixlr and GIMP and one thing Elizabeth and I thought of a little bit earlier today we wished we had included on this page was a source that we finally found, I had done a lot of looking into and comparing a product that we could pay for to use for clip art, to use for images as well as photographs. And we finally settled on graphics factory and I'm putting it in the chat right now. It has really good clip art and it was very inexpensive. I want to say it was like maybe $50 for the year. And you don't have to worry about copyright, and it's got thousands of images. So we would really recommend graphics factory, as well. And with that being said, I think that perhaps we'll go back through the chat and Elizabeth will address some of those things. Unfortunately, I can't answer a lot of the questions you ask. So the best I could do was clarify iThemes for you. Let's go back -- >> Sara, I can chime in -- [ Overlapping Speakers ] >> Make the website slow. >> Excellent, yeah and I can help to cover some of those -- bring up those questions, too, but yes, that was a good one to start with. >> Yes, so the plug-ins, we actually don't use a whole lot of plug-ins. Looking on my screen I think I probably have about -- I would say maybe 15 that have been installed so that I can use them if I want to. I actually don't have all of those activated, though. I keep them there because -- there have been times when I've swapped them out to see if I like this plug-in better, if I don't but having non-activated plug-ins, you'll have on your dashboard, there's a menu that gives you a list of plug-ins that are either installed and activated or just installed. You also have a list of plug-ins that you deleted previously so you have those for a reference, as well. I have not experienced any slowness on my website with installing those plug-ins. And one thing that I would really like to encourage is make sure when you are downloading a plug-in, look at the star rating and not only just it the star rating, look at the number of people who have rated the plug-in. You might have a plug-in that has a five star rating but there's only one person who's rated it versus a plug-in that's similar and offers the same thing, may only have four stars but you have 1,000 people who have rated that. And so having a good, decent plug-in that actually works the way it's supposed to consistently is really important when downloading those plug-ins and I think that will help, if you are experiencing any slowness with your website or if you are concerned with experiencing a lag on your website. And again, I really haven't experienced that at all while I've been downloading plug-ins and using that for my website. Okay. I see audio is cutting out for me. Am I still cutting out Jennifer? >> Yours sounds great. We'll directly chat with that person, thank you. >> Thank you, thank you. >> So can you talk a little bit about -- there was a question about how much flexibility WordPress allows you to paste in a chunk of HTML code, for example, they have a widget that shows a mini event calendar. Is that something that you would be able to put in as an HTML code? >> Yes, especially with WordPress, they just recently released a new update that has made editing the HTML a little bit easier than you've had in the past. The problem is I tend to break sites if I mess with the HTML so I try not to mess with it too much but you do. When you're editing a page, you have your rich text format and right next to it there's a tab with HTML and you can copy and paste your own code or embed your mini calendar into that area. We actually just recently on our resources online posted our Good Reads list. We've put all of our staff picks that everybody's reading onto a list and we've embedded that using the HTML code straight onto our website so people can see what the staff is reading, if they're not able to call in and ask for suggestions. >> That's excellent. Can you talk a little bit about -- is there way for you to test what stuff looks like knowing your comment about maybe -- somebody actually suggested, too, that sometimes plug-ins can cause conflict can each other. Is there a way for you to test what that looks like or are you just at the ready to deactivate something that doesn't work? >> So at first, we actually had a sandbox before we even made the full migration over to WordPress. Kieran gave us our own little sandbox and we could basically go what does this button do and click it and if everything exploded we were good to go because it was a sandbox. As far as today, I'm pretty much ready to just undo that, to deactivate and delete that plug-in. Again, our website we really don't use a lot of plug-ins. What I listed there before, the PDF reader, we have the broken link checker and the statistics. Those are the three main plug-ins we use and iThemes just kind of integrates itself into your dashboard so you don't even notice that it's there, which is really nice. So when we had the sandbox yes, we were okay with just throwing everything out there, seeing what would happen. I just try to make smart plug-in choices when I'm downloading them on my WordPress site today and, you know, something that you might think about, look and see based off of maybe some of your other social networks the times of day that your site is being visited by a lot of people versus just a few. I have the ability to edit the site from home in the evening if I want to test out a plug-in and I know it's 9:00 at night, most people aren't going to be chilling out on my website. I can install it then and look at it. So you can kind of by-pass whether or not you're going to break your site or if somebody's going to see something go totally weird on it. >> Excellent. And somebody recommends you should always be running a production environment as well as a development environment so yeah, I know that's ideal. Let's see. There was a question about -- let's see. You are using the WordPress.org, not WordPress.com, correct? >> Correct yes. >> Okay. That's what I thought. And then there was just so that we verbally recognize that someone asked about whether or not you host your own WordPress server or do you pay someone to host it like GoDaddy and that's the service the state library providers but perhaps other folks can chime in if they have services to suggest for doing that? >> And then -- >> Go ahead. >> I'm sorry, I can -- any questions regarding the hosting of the website itself I can direct you to Sara because or, you know, honestly maybe Kieran, the Colorado state library, would be the best people to talk to. They can give you the list of the website servers. I'm actually not sure. I think we go through godaddy or we did at one point but I'm not sure now. >> The state library hosts it. >> I'm getting a cue from Sara. >> Excellent. All right. Let's see. So there was a question about calendars, whether or not yours, you know -- do you -- are there other choices for calendars or does it have to be connected to google calendar? I would encourage people to chime in if they have other calendar ideas but can you talk a little bit about how yours is working for you? >> Absolutely. I did actually play around with several different online calendars before I went ahead and went with Google calendar. Our staff is small so we have Gmail accounts, we don't have Outlook or anything like that. I'm already heavily integrated into the google universe. So using a google calendar made sense for me. I have easy access to it, I can change it whenever I need to. There are -- there's a plethora of calendar plug-ins available on WordPress. So I would highly recommend trying out a few, seeing what works best for you. I just really like the realtime changes that google would make to my calendar, even if I would sign in from my computer or my phone, changing something on that google calendar, it's up on my website and that was a big perk for me, it made my life easier. >> Excellent. Yeah, and I know -- I forgot to mention earlier on that we in our December poll for cross roads asked folks to share some feedback on their website or to tell us a little bit about their website. I'm going to actually just bring that up for you. I don't know what that is, because there were folks that asked about whether or not there were calendar options for taking registration, and I know you all don't take registration for your events but if anyone on the call has ideas of how they're doing that. I know there are other calendar tools. I don't know if WordPress has a plug-in that takes registration, regarding calendars, this person is trying out an all-in-one event calendar plug-in. So if folks have ideas in terms of taking registration, event espresso is a suggestion here and, like I said, we'll be posting all of this great contribution that's coming through chat into the -- onto the archives page. There are a few other questions I just wanted -- actually keep posting your questions. We've got time, Elizabeth and Sara were speedy in getting through. There was a question about whether or not the website links folks to ebooks and your response was that your catalog links folks to eBooks. If anyone has any experience with integrating Overdrive into WordPress, I know that Overdrive could be its own process so that would be another great thing if folks have experience with that. There's other comments about calendaring tools, eVanced. It provides registration as well as e-commerce payment options, so that's handy to know. >> You know, Jennifer, a fun idea that I have actually played around with, if you're trying to reach especially with registration and calendars, as far as that goes, if you are creating a program for a younger audience, your teens and your preteens, young adults, don't be afraid to utilize Facebook calendar, don't be afraid to put that you're interested in an event here, if you post that on your Facebook page, that's a good way to reach a whole different group of users for your library. >> Yeah, I've actually wondered about that, too. I've been noticing when I do the weekly social library here at webjunction, I've been noticing more and more folks are sort of encouraging more responses to their calendar events. So I think that is not only a great way obviously to market but also to get an estimate you know,, to know if you do need to have a head count that that's helpful in planning. There was a suggestion that you could have an image with a link to your Overdrive on your WordPress site, that's a great idea. I know that Elizabeth has pulled some great steps together in her guide but I wanted to recognize this question around migrating an older website to a new website. Can you talk a little bit about some of your top tips? You did talk a little bit about pre-cleanup before moving but can you talk a little bit about how to minimize or, you know, deal with the workload? Because I know if you have limited staff that are able to help, that that's a challenge. >> Yeah, absolutely. And as Sara mentioned before, we didn't do it the right way. We tried migrating over immediately and it was a mess. But, you know, really it's a good thing to have experience because sometimes, when you do try to make a migration from an old site and you have so much on that old site that isn't up to date, sometimes, it's going to take more time cleaning it on that brand-new website. Really I just want to stress check your links as soon as you can and do your spring cleaning. As far as basic steps in repping for a migration, don't do it alone. And I know that that might seem kind of like a really simple derr step, but having that second set of eyes, looking through all your resources on your library page, it is really, it is such a big help, two heads are always better than one. I would outline a plan. With our website, we really did do this day to day and we consider this an ongoing learning process for us. We really didn't go we're going to be perfect, let's make it happen. We wanted to take our time. We didn't want to rush ourselves and sometimes taking that first step and going okay, what do we want our website to even look like or what do we want it to convey? Have a round-table meeting with the people who are going to be working on this and get your expectations out there, start talking about it, brainstorming, little things like that can really get the ball rolling for you and it can kind of break down that block of "oh, gosh, I have so much, it's so overwhelming." Ity, bitty steps at a time and don't be afraid to take your time day by day. >> I know in your guide you suggest getting input from the community. Did you facilitate any of that kind of conversation? >> We did. We had an open house. It was around the same time and we took time during that open house to do some surveys to get people's input on our library in general and that actually really helped with how we wanted to present ourselves, the same or differently. The really lovely thing about our website is we have a great relationship with the community that we're able to talk to our patrons, we have good relationships with our patrons and we're able to chat with them and to get their opinions. People felt really comfortable coming to us and going hey, I noticed your website's new, this is what I like, this is what I don't like. So it kind of happened organically, but it was really nice having that, though, because we still receive ongoing feedback on our website. We changed out the way our catalog looked and immediately I had patrons coming to me going ahh your catalog changed and they felt comfortable doing that and just making sure you have a good relationship with your community and there's open communication constantly, it allows for that continuous feedback to help you better your site, because a site cannot be "I've created a website and I'm down." It is going to constantly change, it's going to be evolving with your community and with your technology and as your library evolves, so should your website. >> There's some great suggestions coming into chat, as well. I know that in selecting -- both -- someone asked if you sketched out what your site might look like, I think it would be good to pair that, making sure you have a checklist of everything you want but I think with WordPress especially it's great to look at library sites and see -- find a handful of them that maybe have the look that you're looking for and look at what those templates are, because it seems like to be able to see what it looks like with somebody else's content and information in there is really helpful in both remembering the things that you want to have at the forefront and how you want them to be able to find things, as well. So that's a great reminder, as well. Do you all -- I was trying to find an answer to this question. Do you all know the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com? >> You know, I actually -- I can give you the real basic answer. Honestly, going to WordPress, the WordPress.org site itself, they can give you a better example of what it is. There's a difference in cost I know but I'm not familiar enough to give you an educated answer. I can google really fast but I know you can all google because you're all librarians. >> We'll make sure to find an answer for the events page. >> I can't give you an educated answer on that one, I'm sorry. >> And Sara posted a great response. This is an excellent question. How much time do you devote to your website on a weekly basis? So after you've done all of your migration, just on a regular weekly basis, Sara says it takes less than two hours a week, and it's often less than that. is that correct, Elizabeth? >> Yes. That is correct. There are times when I do go once a month through the website, page by page. As Sara said our content is still a work in progress so when we do finally buckle down and start working on that, it is going to take longer to make sure we recultivated those resources but once you get the website set up, it really doesn't take -- it simplifies your life. So it doesn't overcomplicate it and you don't spend a whole lot of time working on it, which is nice. >> Okay. Excellent. There was a question a little while back, this library's local history department has created an online archive of images and scans, hundreds of them. Does WordPress work well with big chunky databases? Again, this might be a case of linking, you know, you're linking out so it shouldn't be too much of an issue but do you all have any experience with connecting to other archives or database content? >> No. For the most part, like you said, we're linking out to other sites. As far as -- I mean, especially if there's a lot of images and it takes up a lot of space, you should be okay. We haven't experienced any lag in our website when we've been playing around with that. I think more it's just a matter of how you want to present it onto the website so it's easy to access from your patrons. You should be -- we have not experienced any issues with that on our end as far as a slower website or it bogging down the website or anything like that. >> Okay. There was another question around a sluggish site. This library asked for sort of basic trouble shooting. When you do have a site that gets slow, they actually encountered their website slowing down since migrating to WordPress so they deleted unused plug-ins and that helped a little bit. But I know that that can be an issue depending on the bandwidth in our community but if folks have other suggestions for how to trouble-shoot that, I know -- I know there are tools that can tell you in terms of what you should be -- what speeds things should be at but if folks have suggestions for analyzing that and then improving that, that would be great, as well. >> A couple of questions I might ask as well is is their website responsive? Are they experiencing that same lag within the library itself? I would get patrons involved and see if they're experiencing lag on their website at home, on their mobile interfaces, I would try different web browsers and I would try it in different locations and see if you can get -- if you figure out if it's the issue with the Internet within the your library itself or if it's an issue with the website itself because that could -- that will completely change how you go about addressing the issue. >> That's an excellent, excellent suggestion for sure. That's a good checklist piece for sure. There was another suggestion that came through, someone when we were talking about registration, that someone used the WordPress form, created a form for people to fill out and that comes to this person to schedule computer training. Don't forget, there are some simple tools within WordPress like a form that can be used for some of those needs, as well. >> We do also use our forms for our inter-library loan requests that patrons can't get a hold of through our catalog. Obviously, the real basic comments, suggestions, we use our forms for that as well and the forms that WordPress offers is really nice, it's really easy to change and customize. That's a fantastic suggestion. >> Absolutely. Let's see. Somebody did post a link on WordPress.com, differentiating the two. So it does sound like WordPress.com is a little bit more ready to go, it includes hosting, so that's a big difference, as well. So there's probably some -- I don't know if there are cost pieces. So that's worth looking at if you're trying to decide which one to go to there. Yes. Stephanie gets all the cyber bacon, exactly. Let me see if I can pull up here, I just want to share with you the visual, because I'm hoping maybe it will give us some other ideas of things to ask around your expertise. So hold on, one second. Okay. Let me go here and see if you're able to see... And keep posting your questions or suggestions as they come. I did post the link to the Facebook group, there's a WordPress librarians Facebook group. Hopefully, some of you on the call are in that group and I've seen a range of expertise, you know, there are some folks in there that are seasoned WordPress folks and really probably an excellent resource for asking questions but there are also folks who are new that chime in there. So it's a really welcoming community, as well. >> Polly is in that group I know. Yes, WordPress and librarians, here I'll post it in there, as well. And I'm going to post a link to the poll so you can open it up in your own browser. A couple of the other areas we asked folks if they had a magic wand and they could change three things about their website, what would those be? And number one was usability for the reader and patrons. So I think that's a really good sign that people are making sure, the open ended responses around that were making sure the site is good for mobile users. As we know many, many, many people are visiting your libraries with their mobile devices. That also I think ties into the overall look and feel. There were folks who were interested in figuring out a way to pay fines online. So glad I remembered to look at this. I was curious to hear if anybody is taking -- has some sort of commerce piece on their WordPress site where they are taking finds. If you have suggestions for how folks can do that, that would be great to hear, as well. There's also a question about whether or not your website is ADA compliant. Can you talk a little bit about that, Elizabeth? >> Why don't you tell people what ADA compliant means just so I know that they know what it means. I'm so sorry. >> ADA compliance covers folks being able to access the site if they have any sort of disabilities. So you know, interactivity, accessibility with vision, hearing. So that usually involves -- I mean, there's actually a whole process I know for ADA compliance. >> Thank you very much. You know, because our website is responsive it works great as far as enlarging or minimizing the screen itself. We don't have anything else that does make it an ADA compliant site. So no, we don't. We have also -- I've never actually had any input from our community requesting that. But yeah, absolutely, if we had a call for it, then I would, and it's something I'm absolutely going to look into just to see what WordPress does offer for that, as well. >> Excellent. That's great. Polly chimed in and said there is a list of accessibility-ready themes in WordPress so that would be a good place to check and see if the theme you're using is compliant, so that's great to know. Somebody did -- Sara, you chimed in that you thought boopsy is one service that allows patrons to pay fines. Stephanie wasn't sure how that magic happens on her own site, I know how that is. Excellent. All right. Well, I'm going to ask anyone who didn't get their question answered or if you have other questions to post those fresh into chat because we have some great ones. Great reminder there that one thing to think about in terms of ADA is making sure your color-blind patrons can read your text and I know that on the image I believe -- I know that Linda in her webinar on data visualization covered that but we also have a few, there's one called Colorzilla, that they addressed, I think they do, I know that -- I know that Linda mentioned it. Let me just look here. There was one called compliant color use. So I will post that in here. Let's see. Someone said that videos with closed captioning can be helpful for folks that need that. Excellent. All right. Well, I really appreciate both of you bringing your experience and expertise. You are -- you are very tech savvy in comparison to many of us so thank you for bringing that to this community and I appreciate, Elizabeth, too, I know that you've offered your e-mail here for folks to contact you with questions. I will also give a plug to Kieran Hixon. If you have questions that we can't answer around WordPress, I know that he is very eager and willing to help. As I posted earlier, they have some wonderful resources, a collection of videos that walk through many of those steps that you would be doing in your initial WordPress work but also many resources that are linked at the bottom of that page so be sure and take a look at the bottom of that page, as well. >> And thank you so much and I mean obviously, I'm not an expert and there are things I don't know so what I love about the community that we have here is that we're able to learn from each other and understand that we can glean from each other and learn from each other. So I really appreciate being able to be a part of this, this has been an excellent experience. >> Thank you so much. And as some of you know, we at webjunction love to connect with folks like you that are practitioners on the ground getting this work done. So I know that you've inspired many folks and I want thank as well all of you who have contributed to chat and brought some great experience and suggestions, as well. And yes, this session is recorded. We'll be posting the recording as well as all the great gems that were posted in the conversation to chat. We'll post that later on today. I will send you an e-mail once that's all up and within a week, I will send you a certificate for attending today and again, a reminder that all of our webinars are archived and added to our course catalog, which is free and available to all who work and volunteer in libraries. We also encourage folks to consider watching our archives together with others in a group. There are many topics that work well for that, if you have specific efforts at your library that you're trying to tackle, it's a great way to learn together and bring some momentum within your learning community. So again, thank you both to Elizabeth and Sara and, of course, to, as you mentioned, the folks at the Colorado state library who have brought many Colorado libraries on board with WordPress and thank you again to our captioner for today. Everyone have a fantastic day.