Design Recommendations

When designing your Public Access site, there are several items to keep in mind to help your online visitors get the most from your site.

•Highlight the content, not the design. Online visitors will be coming to your Public Access site to explore your collections. Your data and images should be the focus, while your site design should play a supporting role to your records. Having a poorly designed or overly complex site may make your site less effective.

•Maintain continuity between your main website and your Public Access site. Use the same logo and maintain a similar color scheme on both sites. Where possible, use comparable fonts and similar layouts to make your Public Access site complement your main website. While not every aspect of your Public Access site will match every page and feature of your organization's main website, your goal is to make the transition as seamless as possible.

•Visit your site from the visitor's perspective. While you are working on site design, view your site with different browsers, using multiple computers and mobile devices. What looks great on one computer might look different on another. You cannot control what hardware and software your online visitors will use, so be sure your design choices work well across multiple platforms.

•Clearly state who you are and provide contact information. If online visitors have questions about your site, they will likely want to contact you. The most common place to put contact information is the footer. Remember to include your phone number, email and physical address along with your social media and website links.

•Be sure to provide a link to your main website. There are several different places you can have this link: make your logo a clickable link, list your URL in your footer, have a hyperlink on your Home Page, etc. You can always make these links open in a separate tab/window so that online visitors don't have to leave your public site.