Visit the new Singapore Public Library website [1] first.

The Good

1. The Existence of 3 different libraries is now clear. I had no idea we had 3 different kinds of libraries.
2. Elimination of the drop down menu is an excellent idea. The disappearance of bread crumbs however is not so nice. It gave me a location in the website where I was in any page.
3. Didn't even know the existence of GoLibrary, but now thanks to the effective left navigation pane, I know about it and can even go to events listed there (this event is especially appealing).
4. Very glad to have the Simple Homepage [2]. Yay!

The Bad

1. Not sure where I am in the site (no "active" links to show where I am now on a page). Even when I click on one of the top 4 main navs (e.g. "Just Ask")
2. Good idea to put the feeds and blogs in the main nav. But feeds list [3] is not showing the links to the actual blogs/pages. I would like to see the content of each blog/page so that I know if I would like to subscribe to them or not.
3. Just share is a new feature and it is not highlighted. Rather it could be marked with a "new" so that people know that it is a new feature and take steps to find out about it.
4. Titles for NLB Blogs list [4] do not link to the blogs themselves. Only the image on the left does. I think people are most likely to click the text themselves rather than the image on the left (which frankly looks more like a bullet point than a representative icon of that blog). Even the link URL itself is not SEO friendly nor memorable (or intuitive).
5. The blog library@esplanade [5] is listing a downloadable link with the list of new arrivals, but would it not be better to integrate it with the existing list of arrivals for the entire Public Library (in a HTML page)? As a user, I dont want to download and then look for items to borrow. I would rather do it in one shot.
6. Each page is titled Public Library, Singapore. That just simply sucks. With 4 tabs open all I can see is "Public Library, Singapore" on all tabs, and dont know which page I am exactly on! Again, really bad for SEO too!
7. JUST BROWSE [6] - the very phrase brings up an image of a catalog to browse. But apparently it is supposed to hold any info about the library and stands for "browsing the site" rather than "browing the catalog". Since it is a library site, everyone is bound to consider the later than "browsing the site".
8. The submit button for logging in to check your account at the simple home page [7] is woefully small. If there are elder users to the site, they will definitely have a hard time figuring out where the submit button is and actually clicking it.

The Ugly

1. No compliance to standards! [8] The site fails validation for HTML 4.01 Strict.
2. No accessibility for blind or handicapped users. I doubt if it even passes Singapore's own accessibility standards as laid out in WIS guidelines. For a start, none of the links in the main nav and side nav have any alternate attribute set. It does not even pass the A level accessibility compliance based on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 [9] (type in "http://pl.sg" here [10] and check for A level compliance). That is a big FAIL for any public service website. What is "public service" if it is not accessible to a percentage of the population (however small)?

On the whole, I find the redesign a step in the right direction and given the huge amount of data that must have been ported, it must have been a humongous task. But it is woefully lacking in some basic standards that any public service website should pass at the minimum.