We like you!

We like to talk with you!

Probably, your patrons and community members like to talk with you too!

They probably also want to see your information and all the cool stuff you have to share with them.

We’re living in the future now people, and the world has moved online. Your material is online, and it needs to be easily accessible.

You need a website. At the very least, you need a page on your parent organization (school, hospital, whoever) website.

And fortunately, it’s really easy to make a website today!

I say this from experience. Neither of us at CMLE knew diddly about web design and setup. We continue to not be experts. But hey – we’ve got a site, and we’ve torn it all down and rebuilt it. When things go wrong, sometimes we even know how to fix it!

*fistbump*

We are happy to help you set up a website, whether it’s one page or more detail. You can set it up for yourself, or work with your IT people, or hire a web designer to put together a nice site.

However you get there: you need a presence on the web.

Here are a few things you should be thinking about as you get started:

• Get a domain name. You an find all kinds of services to help you with this – something like Host Gator, GoDaddy, or Network Solutions. Check to see if the name you want is available, and if so – grab it! If not, well, it’s time to poke around at the name to get something else you like.
• Get a host. You need a place for your site to live. If you are doing a page on your parent website (school, whoever) then this is easy. If not, you can probably use the same service (examples just above here) that helped with your name. We use Bluehost. (Just throwing out a name that has worked for us.)
• Now you want to put stuff on  your site! This used to be very hard, and if you have any HTML skills from the olden days of the web (the 90s, early ’00s) you remember how hard it was to make nice things happen. No worries: it’s so much easier now! WordPress and Squarespace are the biggies you hear about all the time. If you don’t know what you are doing – that is, if you are like me – just go with one of them. We use WordPress and it’s been easy (well…easy-ish…everything is harder than you think is should be!). Just use that.

Whew! There we go – we have a website!

What should you put on it? It’s going to depend on what you want to share with your community. We will talk about content, design, and usability in a later post.

The one thing that every library needs – and I am so enraged when it’s not there, as is true way too often – is a way to contact the library online.

Ponder this for just a fraction of a second. I’m online right now. You’re online reading this. If you come to my website – you’re online doing that.

Stay with me now; here’s where we go deep.

If you are online, on my website, and you want to ask a question or share a thought or suggest a book or point out that the site has been taken over by hackers/ransomware (yes: this happens!), what’s your very first move???

YOU WILL WANT TO SEND ME AN EMAIL.

I have email. You have email.

But if I decide that I now want to force you to get up, get into the car, and drive over to my library (please get dressed first) – that’s incredibly rude.

Slightly down the rudeness scale, but very definitely still on it, would be my alternatively requiring you to find a phone and call me with these questions and thoughts.

THIS. IS. TERRIBLE. SERVICE.

If I did this, it means I am giving no thought at all to the convenience of my community members. I don’t want to make contacting me easy; I want to make it as unpleasant and hard as possible.

When it’s time to ask for an increase to my budget, are you going to remember that I was horrible and rude to you? I’m betting you will. And you are going to tell me that you are giving your money to someone with a basic sense of service to the community.

AVOID ALL OF THIS. HAVE AN EMAIL ADDRESS ON YOUR WEBSITE.

I absolutely do NOT want to hear the various excuses I’ve heard over the years about this, from all sorts of libraries. “I don’t want to give out my email. I don’t want my name on the website. We turn over staff too frequently to put their names up.”

I DO NOT CARE ABOUT THESE STUPID EXCUSES. This is still terrible service.

And there is such an easy answer!

Well: the best answer is to have the names and email addresses of every single manger in your library on a page called “Staff” so they can be reached. My heartfelt applause goes out to the many libraries that do this. And if you include a quick photo, so I have an idea who I’m talking with online – I overflow with pleased gratitude for this!!!!

But. If you have some weird ideas about why that’s So Terrible to connect with your community, then I have thoughts about your lack of customer service.

But still. The very easy workaround is: just get a generic email address. Set up something like Admin @ Mywebsite.com, or AskAQuestion @ Mywebsite.com. Assign someone to check it each day, and forward emails to people as needed.

There.

Good service AND you have successfully (but bizarrely) hidden yourself from the people who make up the entire reason your job exists. BUT: still connecting, so it counts.

 

Okay, our takeaways today are simple:

• You need a website, or at least a webpage
• Put up content
• Put up an email, and hey – all kinds of ways to contact you. Have a Google map (WordPress does this for you!), put up your phone number, set up a chat box. AND, have an email address, preferable with a name. We are a customer service profession, so be available to provide great service!

Bask in the wonderfulness that is you and you library! I join you in the basking, and celebrate the wonderfulness with you.