Website Design: East Central Regional Library
Website design for Library System in East Central Minnesota
About the project
East Central Regional Library is now by far the largest project I have taken on by myself. This project came as a referral from another library website I built for MELSA.
ECRL previously had a wordpress website that was in desparate need of an update. The library was planning a rebranding and needed a website that was up to date, directed the user, and that wasn’t so text heavy.
The platform
As they were already on wordpress and wanted to keep many of their existing plugins, I kept them on wordpress but used Elementor to design the site as it allowed a more visual approach and would also allow me to easily hand the site off to them and allow them to update and edit their site with ease.
Issues of the old website
Their site had several issues besides being out of date, for example: it was too text heavy without many visuals, it was hard to navigate with many buried links, and the design was bland and did not direct the user as to where to go.
Screenshots from the old website
My Approach
With fonts & colors from their new brand, and following their new brand guide I designed their site to be visually interesting without getting too distracting from its actual purpose.
I started with discussion with the client, learning who their target was, why they felt they needed a new website, what issues they were having, and initial talks on new site structure. I then built a prototype using Adobe XD to start looking at design with their new brand and how to organize their pages. After approval of site structure and basic design I started building out their pages in Elementor. The final site reached about 80 pages in total, and included custom icons, page layouts, restructuring, favicon design, background design, instructional videos, and lots and lots of hard work.
I can’t express how excited I am for this site and for East Central Regional Library.
Check it out here: