I wanted to thank everybody for the meeting we had today.
A short recap is in order: please comment and correct.
I understand that the direction we are going to take is a hybrid of mock-up1 and mock-up2. Mock-up 2 is going to be the starting point, the main concept. The home page must capture and spell out all or almost all services that we provide.
The following features of mock-up 1 will be adopted for the main mock-up:
1. Horizontal navigation bar.
2. “How Do I…” box will be positioned in the third column of the main mock-up, currently called “Using Your Library”. It may not be available on all pages.
3. The Catalog Search box may still be available on all library pages on the top as it appears in mock-up 1. However, on the home page it was found to be rather distracting (too dominant) when kept above the main content. It may eventually stay in the leftmost column as it is currently in the main mock-up.
A point was made that it is not necessary to build the entire site based on the home page. The home page is special, it may and should have more navigation options, more navigable text than any other page, and it is not necessary to make all pages in the image of the home page. Obviously some stylistic unity must be maintained, but it is a different topic.
We entertained the idea of eliminating the banner (as it is now) in the main mock-up to save real estate. Please comment on this as well.
It was mentioned that the home page design does not have to be dominated by a consideration that some of our patrons are using large fonts and set their monitors at low resolution (800x600). In other words, we do not want to design with the lowest common denominator in mind. This decision will improve our ability to have a more graceful screen resizing, as well as to place everything above the fold.
Mock-up 3 turned out to be elegant but not practical. That design does not capture at a glance all the services the library offers. It was designed with a more hierarchical, less egalitarian approach to services that are “revealed” along the path of mouse-clicks. A meta-home page, with sub-home pages to follow. It was said, we're not ready for it.
Did I forget anything regarding home page discussion?
I would like to suggest that we start putting the requrements in writing. I would like to compile requirements into a rather formal list of what we want to have on the home page and where. It will help us to see tension points between the mission of the home page and some low level requirements.

A question of graceful resizing of web pages has no perfect answer. As the amount of information we display per page increases we realize that the virtual space is almost as limited as any physical space. When users resize a browser window, or increase text size (actions we have no control of and often have similar negative effect on the original page layout) they still hope to see a usable page. If there is no white space on the page to absorb the shrinkage, overlaps and truncations often render the page unusable.
Picture #1 shows how resizing of the browser window can push navigation links on the right column “under” the left column. In this picture, the size of the left column has been set in %, not in absolute values. There is a white gap between the picture and the footer indicating that when the browser window is being resized, the left column is accommodating the shrinkage. But it’s only half of the solution. The image does not resize, and the content of the right column is diving under the image. To make the image resize together with the left column, a magic CSS statement is needed:

#leftcolumn img{width:100%}

Picture #2 shows a more user-friendly outcome.
There is still one problem. What if we have two equally important columns? Or three, or four? In the example above we can sacrifice the left column and the image to keep the main content on the right usable even if the browser window is shrunk by more than 30%. And this is not an unusual use case. If you want to keep both the library site and Amazon.com up(without minimizing them, while you copy/paste from one window to the other) 30% is not that unusual.
It is a luxury to decide that everything goes above the fold in the web page. The requirement of having no vertical scrolling is the first victim of reality. But it is still considered a design faupax to make users scroll horizontally. If we have no horizontal scrolling, and all columns are important and “stuffed” with information to the brim, the solution introduced above, though technically possible, is no better than leaving the screen at the mercy of the user.

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