The results of our 2011 member survey sent us a message loud and clear: users of WebJunction greatly appreciate how much information the website contains, its breadth and depth and variety. However, users do want the information to be presented more simply, with less clutter, less text, fewer links to click, and fewer hoops to jump. We hear you, and will be focusing on making those improvements throughout the rest of the year.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we started the simplification by paring down the home page to the most popular content. Our next target has been the discussion boards. When we relaunched the new version of WebJunction.org in 2008, we experimented with decentralizing the forums so that there was a separate board for each topic, scattered throughout the website. The idea was that visitors to the website would be looking for resources on a topic, navigate there, and then explore the variety of content formats to get the answers they need, including forums. It may have been an interesting concept, but forum software was not built to be used that way, and we stretched the feature beyond its practical capacity. Visitors have had a hard time finding the discussions and, more importantly, keeping up with the activity there.
So, we have consolidated most of the discussion forums to three main areas:
If you click any of the three tabs on the top WebJunction menu for those areas, you will see the related discussions right on the page. No need to drill down any further for subtopics.
We also took the opportunity to do some weeding of the boards, which have been accumulating content since 2004. We moved only those threads with recent activity (basically, posts in 2011) to their new location. We archived the older threads.
There are some additional places you will find discussion forums:
- Workforce Resources – these threads related to serving job seekers and the unemployment have been kept as a stand-alone topic for the time being, while our Project Compass work is still in full swing
- Group pages – the discussions hosted by member groups are still on those pages
- Getting Started – forum for support using WebJunction
- State Library Partner discussions – forums that are hosted on the state-specific versions of WebJunction have not been moved.