Design study · Public library district · Missouri
Five buildings, one search box, and the county's own memory
A library district website concept where the homepage answers the question people actually arrive with — is my branch open right now? — and one box searches the catalog, the programs, the documents, and a genuinely serious local-history archive at once.
Concept only. Facts are sourced from the district's published site and RFP; this is not the official Jefferson County Library website.
- Library website design
- WordPress theme
- Federated search
- Spanish routes
- WCAG 2.2 AA
- Local history archive
Jefferson County Library — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
A five-location district serving about 135,000 people has a discovery problem that a single-branch library does not. Hours differ by building. Programs are booked in one system, the catalog lives in another, local-history material sits in a third, and the website is a fourth thing that links out to all of them. A parent checking whether Windsor storytime is still on, a retiree tracing family through county archives, and a teen logging summer reading are each sent somewhere else — and each has to know which system holds their answer before they start.
The approach
The homepage opens with an 'Open right now' board: each building photographed by the district itself, with computed hours and the day's events, so the most common question is answered before any navigation happens. The masthead box then searches everything at once — site pages, LibCal-sourced programs, hosted and OCR-indexed documents, and a sampling of the district's own Evergreen catalog, linking through to its Aspen Discovery records. A separate dark reading-room wing carries the county's memory: the Della Lang oral histories recorded by a founding trustee, the Murder and Mayhem case files, and the local-history archive, set in a typewriter record register that signals you have moved from services into stories. The visual world grows out of the district's own logo — a book that branches — in navy ink and river teal on cool paper.
The result
A working site of 26 routes on a real WordPress theme, with six server-rendered Spanish routes shipping alongside an independently reviewed translation receipt rather than a machine-translation overlay. WCAG 2.2 AA testing returned zero axe violations across all 27 routes.
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