Beta Site Changes- now ready for the public
Thanks to all of you who provided feedback. We have been working on implementing many of your suggestions and have completed some of the intended functionality. Here are some highlights of what you can now see:
- Added more sections including Find Your Way to Career & Job Search Help, Help For Newcomers,
Français
- Non-holdable DVDs have a help page and more usable information in search results
- Search relevancy for author searching has been improved
- The banner is no longer animating
- Place hold, your account, and sign in are working as intended
- Performance has been improved greatly
- Resolved some cross browser compatibility problems (IE 6 etc.)
Today we're launching to the public through the web team blog. We are doing a 'soft' launch. This means that we are only communicating this through the blog. It will not be linked to the main TPL website or communicated through other channels.
We encourage to watch the blog and see customer feedback as it comes in. We will continue to keep staff up to date on this blog so stay tuned.
4 thoughts on “Beta Site Changes- now ready for the public”
It would be helpful to know when you have been logged out of your account due to the timeout – since the session does not timeout at the same time. Could the display of holdings which occurs once a hold has been placed be eliminated? Holdings should only display when they are requested. I find the site to be attractive and nicely laid out. If you are looking to browse, I think that the site offers a wealth of material. However, if you are looking to find exact information, the process can be somewhat extended to retrieve it.
I searched for “The suite life of Zack and Cody” and the first item listed was a Hannah Montana video. The next three were Zack and Cody. As has been commented on, the site is very slow — moving from page to page, searching, following links, etc. (I’m on IE 7 and accessing the site from home.) I thought it was a bit odd that when you complete a hold, the word “Success” appears at the end of the process.
I haven’t read everyone’s comments, so these may have already come up: I entered my account info when prompted to place my first hold (instead of signing in), and it remembered the info for subsequent holds I placed on those search results (which was great). I then did another search, and when I went to place a hold, it asked me for my account info again. This seems inconsistent. The display for Your Account is not very user friendly (different typefaces, centred type, etc.) and there’s no way to go back to where I was when I clicked on it. If I click on the TPL logo (which isn’t 100% intuitive for how to go back) I got taken to the home page. I realize the design of this page isn’t finished and there will be the integration of the navigation, but it really looks out of place on the site right now.)
Just using the Beta site to look for taxonomy and the best results for our purposes seemed to be the Related Internet Links.
I found though that the link opened in the TPL website and then if I explored a bit, I had to go back back back!
With the way Internet Explorer is set up, staff cannot set the preferences to open in a new tab or window – at least according to the Help in IE.
Should / could the Related Internet Links automatically open a new window? I certainly would prefer it.