Library Home Page Design: A Comparison of Page Layout for Front Ends to ARL Library Web Sites

Abstract

The author examined the home pages of all 120 libraries in the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) in order to compare design similarities and differences. This was accomplished by first filling out a questionnaire on each home page and then tabulating the findings using simple averages and medians. Areas examined were: backgrounds, document headers, document footers, document body, page length, number of steps to library home page from parent institution Web site, and domain name servers. A typical home page is discussed using the averages of these results.