I enjoy browsing the lists of contests like the Webby Awards because, in any given category, I'm sure to be unfamiliar with at least one of the nominees. (Even in the highly popular comedy/captioned-pictures-of-kittens area, there was a nominee I'd never even heard of!) All right, I'm not going to get away with festooning our library homepage with lolcats, but I might see some inspiring typography or layout.

Still, there's a limit to how much non-library webdesign can help us. A library website is so much more than brochureware and it's unlike ecommerce in the sense that we're trying to guide and inform our users, not drive them towards a purchase. I thought of this recently while looking at the dashboard of Google Analytics. One of their most prominently featured metrics is "bounce rate":

Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to your visitors. ("About this report")

Our library site's bounce rate is close to 80%. I would like to find out more about this through some upcoming user study, but my suspicion is that our users land on our front page and then immediately click on a proxied link to a favorite resource. If so, this statistic would indicate that the page is meeting user needs: their need to get to the information they need quickly.

In that case, we're not seeing a fault with a site, but rather an example of how good library web design is different from good commercial web design.