Updating the Museum's Online Presence

At the very beginning of my fourth week on site at the National Watch & Clock Museum, I started by physically replacing the last few old Quick Response (QR) codes in the Museum. Some of the codes were underneath glass hoods that had to be unscrewed and lifted in order to change them out. Museum staff assisted me with this process. Once complete, my work with QR codes was finished and I was able to begin work on a new project.

The Museum's current interface for its online gallery tour.

I met with two other interns (Kent and Ryan) and two members of the Museum staff to discuss revamping the online representation of the Museum’s permanent galleries. The current web pages were extremely old and unexciting. The other interns and I were instructed to come up with a new design for the online exhibits. We spent a good deal of time brainstorming, touring the actual Museum exhibits and looking at the online galleries of other museums. Eventually we came up a few different basic ideas and presented them to the Museum staff that was helping us. A concept that was eventually decided on was to have the main page represent a clock and different areas or “times” on the clock link to pages containing information on specific sections of the Museum.

One of the gallery pages from the Museum's current online tour.

We are currently in the process of figuring out the best way to generate a graphic(s) that will represent the homepage of online galleries section of the Museum’s website. We have a rough design that we will most likely try to create in Adobe Photoshop. We also need to figure out how to break the Museum’s exhibits into twelve relevant sections (one for each hour position on the clock). Once these things are done, we can begin to generate some of the HTML code for the web pages. We are still considering how we want to do this. We may simply hard code the HTML in a text editor or we may look into to using a program like Wordpress or Dreamweaver.

Shay, St. Mary's College of Maryland
Museum Intern