With the arrival of the newly designed library website, we thought now would be an appropriate time to revisit the previous website designs.
The Gaston County Public Library's website has changed in appearance quite a lot over the past quarter of a century. Thank you to the Wayback Machine on Internet Archive, we can view one of the earliest archived examples of the library website from October 17, 2002.
This 2002 design is like the very earliest archived example from 1999. I was always amused that the wallpaper of the webpage seemed to mimic the color and texture of the actual wallpaper within the Main Library building at the time, which most likely was a deliberate aesthetic choice.
 |
| (Actual Main Library wallpaper circa 2015) |
Once I realized this was the extent of what I had to contribute about this design, I decided to ask the library's Digital Services Coordinator (who has worked hard behind the scenes to launch our latest website) to offer opinions on the previous versions.
Digital Services Coordinator:
"This was, from what I have been told, our very first website and it was the site I inherited when I became responsible for all things technology related. It was originally edited in Microsoft Word before I moved us to Microsoft FrontPage, which no longer exists. It offered little flexibility and I do not miss it, but it was a big step forward for us as things Internet related were blowing up."
Although the library's actual wallpaper would linger for about another decade, the library's next webpage, launched in early 2007, adopted a cleaner background and looked better as evidenced by this example from July 19, 2007.
Digital Services Coordinator:
"Our first professionally designed site! It was a huge step forward for us but still not the easiest to maintain. It still lacked many of the features we needed, especially a calendar of events to house all the programs, events, and happenings across the regional library (yes, this site was the last before the region broke apart). In a weird twist of irony, the Sumner Group also created the new site for our Friends group."
As background information, Gaston and Lincoln Counties joined together to form a regional library system in order to benefit from a block grant for shared administrative and technical operations. The Gaston-Lincoln Regional Library System dissolved in June 2012 which caused both counties to operate as two separate library systems again.
As a result of the separation from Lincoln County, the now single Gaston County Public Library had the opportunity to move to a new address starting in July 2012.
Digital Services Coordinator:
"Hello modern web platform, good-bye regional library. This site was born out of the dissolution of the Gaston-Lincoln Regional Library and was shrouded in secrecy with a new logo and color scheme to represent the Gaston County Public Library during a time of great change. I was excited to move to the MURA platform that had the modern tools we needed such as a forms wizard, permissions to allow others access, etc. I finally won the battle to add a calendar and we linked our LibCal account to this site."
Times change and so do Gaston County logos, hence the arrival of the "big blue G" in 2021. However, the library was able to adapt our logo to align with the County's "G" logo.
Here is an example of the newly branded library logo and color scheme incorporated into the library's website from December 6, 2021:
Digital Services Coordinator:
"Once Gaston County issued its official branding we moved this site to the new color palette and logo that are helping to shape our new site, officially unveiled on 15 November 2023. This site, built on the CivicPlus platform has more features than I can list but checks about every box we had and I look forward to this next chapter of maintaining our online presence!"
Behold the arrival of Gaston County Public Library's new website!
Brian Brown, Librarian, Local
History & Genealogy
