Rebecca Atkinson is impressed by a fresh print-on-demand site
The National Museum of the Royal Navy has launched a print-on-demand website featuring more than 300 digitised and fully licenced images from its collection of images. This features a full range of products, from canvas art prints to greeting cards, tea towels and mugs. A carousel of images makes it easy for people to get a sense of the type of works for sale, and aims to tempt them in.
Visitors can browse by a wide selection of themes (for example, the first world war, naval life, pets and the weird and the wonderful) or product. The images available on the site are quite small, which is annoying from a potential shopper’s perspective, but additional information about images is a nice touch. The website automatically suggests related items, a trick the likes of online retailers such as Amazon already use to boost sales.
Once you’ve registered on the site, purchases seem easy to make, although it doesn’t appear to accept PayPal. Built by Archiver print-on-demand service, the website looks fresh and is a nice example of a museum trying to push online retail.
Rebecca Atkinson clicks on a honeycomb of hexagons
Greater Manchester Museums Group’s new website showcases 400 key objects from museums across the region and aims to tell the story of their shared heritage. The site, which was shortlisted for a Big Chip digital award, is based around a beautiful honeycomb design (bees being the symbol of the city).
As well as providing visitor information, what’s on and learning resources, the heart of the site is “Our Connected History”, where people can explore the collection in detail.
On the collections homepage each hexagon links either to an object record, one of the group’s museums or to a particular theme or issue (“Egyptian” and “Conflict and Change”, for example).
This doesn’t quite fit onto the homepage and users have to scroll along, which is a shame as it makes it hard to see all the options on offer. Users can change what is shown in the hexagons to location or categories.
The museum and thematic homepages feature more hexagons of objects. These cropped images are not very easy to decipher at first glance, so you have to hover and click for a name and then click again to enter the object record.
There is then a full image of the object or work of art, a brief description and the option to share the image on social media sites. But where is the information about which museum houses the object? Scroll down to the page’s tags and you should hopefully be able to work it out.
The visual design of this site is beautiful and clever, but it does not seem to take into account first-time visitors. It took me a while to work out how to navigate my way around, and even when I had, the small cropped images didn’t inspire me to explore further than I had.
One of my (online) bugbears is museum websites hosted by their local authority. These are normally ugly, hard to use and off-putting to potential visitors.
Bristol Museums recently launched its own website, which brings together information about Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, M Shed (which previously had its own website), and four other venues: the Georgian House Museum, Bristol Record Office, the Red Lodge Museum and Blaise Castle House Museum.
The design of bristolmuseums.org.uk is bold and friendly. Each venue has its own homepage, with a second navigation bar offering details about what’s on, collections and so on.
You can also hover over the museums in the top navigation bar to get a quick overview of what’s on. I feel that opening times could have been included in this, but it’s so easy to find this information that it probably won’t be missed.
The website follows the principle that users’ needs come first. It also makes a strong case for visiting the city’s cultural organisations, something local authority websites often struggle to do.
