Preparing for Your Plinkit Site

Before a Plinkit site can be created and configured for your library, you must enter into a Partnership Agreement with the Oregon State Library (OSL), which maintains Plinkit. The Partnership Agreement outlines the responsibilities of both OSL and your library with regard to configuring and maintaining your Plinkit site and contributing to further Plinkit development.

The OSL Plinkit Administrator will review the Partnership Agreement with you as part of a site configuration process. As another part of this process, you will provide OSL with some basic information and at least one image file, as described below.

Providing Graphics for Your Top Banner

One of the most important things you will need to do to customize your library’s Plinkit Web site is to provide an attractive banner graphic that will appear at the top of all Plinkit pages in your site.

The top banner should, at a minimum, display your library name. We recommend also incorporating into the banner an image associated with your library or community. Here is a sample banner design:

When you are designing your banner, keep in mind that a tall graphic will “push” the rest of the Plinkit page content down, which may result in your users having to scroll more to view information. Notice the height of the following banner compared to the previous example.

The following guidelines will help you develop appropriately sized banner graphics

·        The recommended maximum height is 125 pixels.

·        The recommended maximum width (for centered banner images) is 575 pixels.

·        The banner background can either contain an image or be transparent.

You will be asked to provide your banner graphic(s) to the OSL Plinkit Administrator, who will upload them and configure the top banner for you during the site configuration process.

Planning Contact Us Web Forms

The About Us section of your site can contain pages that function as e-mail forms. These forms provide a convenient way for your patrons to e-mail questions, suggestions, or requests to the correct library staff person, all without leaving Plinkit.

When your Plinkit site is initially set up, the Contact Us page will contain several sample e-mail form links for common patron activities, as shown below.

Each of these links opens a customized e-mail form . Here's an example of what the form for the Ask your librarian a question link might look like:

When the user clicks submit, the information entered on the form is sent to an e-mail address you have specified during the site configuration process.

The Plinkit Administrator can create custom forms to meet your needs. These forms can include required fields (indicated with a red box next to the field name), fields that initially contain default values (such as the Country field above), either/or questions for which a user can select only one option (like the Are you a student? question above), and free-from fields (such as the Your Question text box above).

Although we do not recommend that library site Editors attempt to configure or edit e-mail forms, the OSL Plinkit Administrator can create and customize forms your site, according to your specifications.

During the site configuration process, you will be asked to specify:

1.      Which of the default Contact Us links and e-mail forms you would like to have included in your site.

2.      What changes, if any, are necessary to the forms to meet your needs.

3.      Whether other forms would be useful and, if so, what the required and optional fields on such forms should be.

4.      To whom the information submitted on each form should be sent. (For instance, purchasing requests might go to purchase@yourlibrary.org, while general questions are sent to info@yourlibrary.org.)