Cuberis – Museum Website Design and Development

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Effective websites strategically nudge visitors toward predetermined actions. On museum websites, this typically includes purchasing tickets, making a donation, signing up for a newsletter, or purchasing a membership or an item from the online store. As we discussed recently, Call to Action (CTA) buttons are an effective way to increase conversion rates, especially when they (1) are placed strategically, (2) use clear and concise language, and (3) are visually prominent.

In this article, we will go beyond “above the fold” CTA buttons and explore effective practices for CTA placements on other parts of a page.

Calls to Action vs. Typical LinksBefore we begin, we should note that any link can be styled as a button, but that does not make every button a Call to Action. For our purposes in this article, a Call to Action is a link that is:

Goal-Oriented – A Call to Action prompts a visitor not merely to visit another part of the site, but to do something: make a purchase, fill out a form, download a file or an app, etc.
Conversion-Driven – Ideally, a Call to Action can be tracked in terms of measurable conversions.

Buttons not in this category include ones that simply say things like “Explore” or “Learn More.” While these links may be part of an important strategy to direct visitors to a particular page, they are not calling the visitor to take a particular action. They are simply visually-appealing ways of navigating a site.

In short, a CTA button is like a salesperson—attempting to influence behavior—while a link styled as a button is like a signpost—identifying how to proceed to a destination of interest.

Sign Up for Our NewsletterThe most common place to find a call to sign up for a museum’s newsletter is in a website’s footer. This might take two forms: a button or an embedded form.

A button is a clean and simple way to direct users to a sign-up page or trigger a pop-up window where they can fill in their information. Around half of surveyed museum websites use this method, of which the Asian Art Museum’s footer is a typical example:

Other museum websites (around 50% of the three dozen I browsed) save users a step by embedding a form directly into the footer, as we see in the footers of The Met and the Detroit Institute of Arts:

For visitors who may need a motive to subscribe, adding an explanation alongside the button can be useful, as seen on the website of The Natural History Museum (UK):A form that includes more than a simple email address field may be undesirable if it takes up too much space, but some museums have figured out clever ways around this limitation. The California Science Center, for instance, features this simple form in their footer…

…which expands after “Enter your email” is clicked:

Besides the footer, a site may have other strategic areas to place a newsletter sign-up form. The Natural History Museum’s News page features a sign-up form halfway down the page in the middle of its latest articles:

Purchase Tickets or MembershipA call to purchase tickets or a museum membership are by far the most common CTA buttons in website headers. They can also be found on other parts of pages, typically next to descriptions of current or upcoming exhibitions.

(For museums that charge for general admission, multiple calls to purchase tickets are likely less necessary than for museums that offer free admission but charge for particular exhibitions. In the former case, purchasing a ticket is simply a necessary requirement for visiting the museum; in the latter case, it is an optional add-on.)

A CTA ticket button at both the top and bottom of a page can be an effective method of keeping it in front of visitors. The Kennedy Space Center’s “Explore Attractions” page features a CTA button first in the header, then again at the bottom of the page once a visitor has finished scrolling:

The North Carolina Museum of Art—which offers free general admission but requires tickets for special exhibitions—has no ticket CTA in its header but does feature a prominent button on pages for paid exhibitions:

A ticket button and a membership button often go hand-in-hand, especially when a membership perk is free or discounted tickets. Information on membership next to ticket information is seen in the example above and also on the Art Institute Chicago’s exhibition page:

As the American Museum of Natural History informs visitors, “Members See It Free”:

A mistake to avoid is placing membership information too far down a ticketing page to be easily noticed. Giving potential ticket-purchases an easy choice between clicking on buying a ticket or a membership increases the chances that they will choose the latter.

Apart from being combined with ticket purchase CTAs, CTA buttons encouraging membership are often seen as their own entities on homepages, often with accompanying text and image:

The Victoria and Albert Museum (Homepage):

Detroit Institute of Arts (Homepage):

Cleveland Museum of Art (“Plan Your Visit” page):

Make a DonationA call to make a donation is typically made in a similar way on the homepage. A donation button on its own would be less effective than the kind of brief appeal combined with an image and a CTA button seen from the following museums:

National Museum of American History (homepage):

Cleveland Museum of Art (homepage):

The National WWII Museum (homepage):

ShopOnce again, we see the same format for buttons directing visitors to the museum’s online storefront:

Art Institute of Chicago (homepage):

Houston Museum of Natural Science (homepage):

Victoria and Albert Museum (homepage):

Other CTAsMore helpful Calls to Action might include “Plan a Field Trip,” “Host an Event,” “Take a Survey,” or “Download the App.” Each of these, like the others already described, are actionable items which can be measured and which go beyond merely browsing the website.

National Museum of American History:

Art Institute Chicago (note how the familiar App Store and Google Play buttons are used in place of a standard button):

Automating CTAs with Dynamic WorkflowsWith a dynamic platform like the one Cuberis offers, CTAs that are date-specific can be automated to disappear at a particular date and time. This can save effort and help ensure that a “Get Tickets” button for a temporary exhibition or a holiday-themed “Give the Gift of Membership” button will only display during the right period of time.

Museums can also create dynamic workflows for changing the content of a CTA after it has been acted on. For example, once a visitor subscribes to a mailing list, the same CTA location can be updated to show a membership CTA. If the visitor becomes a member, the CTA can be swapped out for a donation button.

For a demonstration of this feature try this demo signup. It will redirect you to a thank you page where it sets a cookie. There will be a return button that links back here where you will see the membership CTA instead. (Note: this feature relies on cookies so it may not function correctly if your computer disallows cookies.)

Demo Newsletter Signup(Doesn't add you to any lists)NameEmailPretend SignupDone well, an effective CTA supports the museum’s objectives and enhances a visitor’s experience on the website and, ultimately, at the museum.

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It’s a lazy Sunday afternoon, and you’ve decided it’s a perfect day to spend an hour or two browsing around a new local bookstore. As you push open the front door, the smell of books mingles with the scent of brewing coffee drifting over from the café. You glance around the store, eager to start exploring, but suddenly pause in confusion as you survey the signs labeling the shelves. To your right, “Art History” sits next to “Trade Paperbacks”; to your left, “Shakespeare” flanks “Simon & Schuster”; and straight ahead, “Deckle Edged” is shelved next to “20th Century Authors.” Perhaps the booksellers had a reason to label the categories this way, you surmise, but it is definitely hindering rather than helping your attempt to navigate the store.

Likewise, event calendars on museum websites can also be difficult to navigate if they are not constructed carefully. The challenge is that every event has a variety of characteristics:

Who is the expected audience?
Where will the event be located?
Is it part of a larger series?
What does it cost?
Is it tied to an exhibition?
How does it fit into the museum’s internal organizational structure?

An effective event calendar helps users efficiently search, filter, and browse to find precisely the kinds of events they are looking for. Many museums do this well, having carefully thought through the best way to set up these tools and have taken advantage of the many effective platforms now available for powering these pages. Quite a few websites still have a lot of work to do in making their events calendars user-friendly.

In this article, we will describe some do’s and don’ts of organizing an event calendar, surveying some great (and not-so-great) examples along the way.

Two Principles to RememberFirst, let’s review a couple basic principles we laid out in our prior article on Organizing Your Museum’s Event Calendar:

Quantity of content dictates the form of your search and filter tools.

More events require more search and filter options. Otherwise visitors will have a harder time narrowing down their choices. Fewer events require fewer search and filter options.

When a user has the ability to select from multiple filters at once, there is an increased risk that a query will return no results. One solution is to simply not include as many filter options; another is to set up the filter so that events are displaythat meet ANY of the checked options rather than ALL of them (that is, a “OR” operator instead of an “AND” one). We will come back to this issue below under “Extensive Filters for Large Museums” to see a few creative ways museums handle this problem.

The key is to strike the right balance between simplicity and usability. Don’t overwhelm users with too many options, but give them the number appropriate for the data through which they need to sift. 2. Avoid internal category terms.

Programs with titles like “Creative Communities” might make sense to museum staff, but are less likely to be helpful for typical users. “Workshops,” “classes,” or “performances” make more sense and most of the time are perfectly adequate.

A Third Principle: Avoid Mixing CategoriesTo these we can add another principle: Don’t make users choose between non-mutually-exclusive categories. A dropdown menu that forces users to select between “Workshops,” “Educators,” “Free,” and “Weekend Events” will likely cause confusion and prevent users from finding what they are looking for.

Even prominent museum websites can fall into this mistake. This museum features a dropdown menu that forces users to choose between these options, when many users might be interested in selecting more than one:

What do I select if I am looking for classes for teens, or workshops for educators?

Another museum has a similar dropdown menu:

Is mixing non-mutually-exclusive categories in a single dropdown menu ever sensible? The Guggenheim offers a clever solution to this problem. Itsmenu features checkboxes which allow multiple categories to be selected as the same time:

Keeping Categories SeparateTo avoid the mixed-category problem, most museum sites opt to create different filter menus for different categories. These typically include the following filters:

Date
Event Type
Audience
Location

Date

“Date” might include options like “Today,” “This Weekend,” or “Select a Date.” It often includes a month-at-a-glance calendar that provides a better visual for selecting the date.

Event Type

“Event Type” is most widely open to different options and will depend on the museum. What list should your museum use? It depends. The key is to think it through carefully in a way that makes the most sense for users.

Here are some examples from a few different museum:

Art Institute Chicago – Event Types:

Class/Workshop
Talk
Tour
Screening
Special Event

The British Museum – Event Types:

Exhibition
Online events
Gallery talks & tours
Accessible event
Lectures & discussions
Performance
Demonstration
Film
Study days & courses
Family activity
Sleepover
Members’ exclusive

Tate Modern – Event Types (this site uses checkboxes so more than one can be selected):

Exhibitions
Tours
Private Views
Food and Drink
Festivals
Collection Displays
Talks
Members Hours
Lates
Access
Films
Workshops
Courses
Performances
Online Events

The Getty Museum features a more interesting visual menu for browsing:

Audience

Audience is another common category, but it has its pros and cons.

Here are examples from the same museums we just considered:

Art Institute Chicago – Audiences:

General/Public
Members
Luminary
Families
Teens
Educators
Researchers/Scholars

The British Museum – Audiences:

General Audience
Adult
Young person (ages 16-24)
Family
Family (under 5s)
Member
Young friends
See everything

Tate Modern – Audiences (this site uses checkboxes so more than one can be selected):

Access
Families
Groups
Tate Members
Schools and teachers
Young people

(The Getty Museum does not provide filtering by audience.)

While this sort of demographic segmentation may be helpful in some cases, it introduces a difficulty we described previously:

While some events may be tightly associated with particular audiences, many are audience agnostic. And so, if you use audience segmentation, those events that are not clearly audience specific will end up being “tagged” for every audience. The result is a set of categories that offers no meaningful differentiation between events. And that obscures those events that do fit a demographic segment.

Generally speaking, your events (and all your content for that matter) is better off being categorized by what it is, concretely, than by which audience you believe it would most appeal to. If you develop clear and concrete organizational categories, every audience will be able to easily find what they are looking for, regardless of whether they are a teacher, a parent, an art enthusiast, or a researcher.

So while demographic segmentation may be a helpful way to exclude events not appropriate to a particular audience, it is not always an effective way for users to identify events aimed at a particular audience. For this reason, Audience is not a category we recommend using.

More Filter OptionsCategories & Labels

What should be done with event attributes that do not easily fit into a particular category? One solution is to add a menu for Labels, which would include other characteristics (unrelated to the category itself) that a user may want to select.

For examples, on the Albany Museum of Art’s event calendar, we’ve included the following labels:

Community Event
Free
Members Exclusive
RSVP

Listing these as labels rather than categories allows users to select a Category and a label to filter results simultaneously.

Extensive Filters for Large MuseumsFew museums will host as many events as The Met, but its search and filter page is worth mentioning as an example of how a museum might provide users with a large number of options to choose from. Perhaps its most helpful feature is the ability to select a large number of options simultaneously from different categories:

With such an extensive range of options to choose from, one of its most helpful features is that the search/filter results update instantly whenever an option is clicked. In contrast, the events calendar of the National Gallery (UK) requires users to click an “Apply Filters” button after selecting options, which is more time consuming and is more likely to result in zero results.

The British Museum solves this problem by making filter options instantly disappear when selecting them would result in zero results.

Listing Categories and Labels on Individual Event PagesOnce a user has clicked on an event, displaying its categories and labels on that event’s page can help them to discover related events.

The most straightforward method is to include the categories and labels that were available on the initial event calendar page. Some museum sites add new categories that were not initially searchable, but there is not usually a compelling reason to do it this way. (One exception may be if it is part of a program whose title is important to the museum staff but not necessarily visitors.)

One website creates some confusion by displaying “Event Types” above another list of tags, some of which are duplicated on both lists. To add to user confusion, the event types can be clicked to reveal more events in the same category, but the labels in the boxes cannot. There may have seemed to be a rationale behind this from the perspective of the site designers, but not to a website visitor.

On the other hand, The Field Museum offers a straightforward list of hyperlinked categories at the top of each event page that are easy to understand.

Best Practices for Museum Event CalendarsIn short, designing effective museum event calendar pages means implementing these key principles:

Design the events calendar for visitors (not for the museum’s staff)
Avoid forcing users to choose between non-mutually-exclusive categories
Incorporate design elements (like check-boxes or other multiple-selection options) that make filtering options more user-friendly
To allow users to find related events, include hyperlinked tags on individual event pages

For more ideas on search and filter practices, many tips for ecommerce sites can be applied to museum event calendars as well.

The post Logical Facets and Filters for Museum Events Calendars appeared first on Cuberis - Museum Website Design and Development.

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Believe it or not, there’s an upside to garage fires. Last Spring, a refrigerator in our garage caught fire. Fortunately, I was able to put it out before the fire spread. By the way, assuming you know where your fire extinguisher is, here’s a tip—make sure you cut off the zip tie that holds the pin on. You don’t want to be doing this while struggling to see your hands in front of your face during a fire. Just sayin’.

The upside? Everything in that garage had to be removed, cleaned, and put back after repairs and repainting. It forces a very thorough Spring cleaning.

But garages aren’t the only places prone to clutter. Your website does too, but it’s not as easy to see.

The Importance of Regular Tune-Ups for WordPress Websites

A WordPress website tune-up is akin to a comprehensive spring cleaning for your online presence. It encompasses various crucial tasks that ensure your website remains efficient, secure, and user-friendly. Here are several ways to clean up a WordPress site beyond routine plugin updates.

Platform and User Audits: Verifying key platform account holders and auditing your WordPress users is important for maintaining security and control over your website. Removing legacy accounts will protect against unapproved administrative access. However, note that removing a user requires reassigning any content they authored.. If this becomes problematic you can opt to simply change an old user’s password. Alternatively, you could install the Publish Press “Authors” plugin and set up corresponding non-login author accounts and assign the WP User account to the Author account so that their authored content will still display their names, even when they are no longer with your museum, and no longer have a login account.

Backup and Security Reviews: Routine checks and updates of backups and security measures are vital to safeguard your site from data loss and cyber threats, ensuring a secure experience for your visitors. We typically use Updraft for quick backups (in addition to full automated server backups). We also recommend Wordfence for site security. Both of these plugins offer free versions.

Database Optimization: WordPress is a database driven content management system. Any database driven software product can get cluttered with legacy tables and records. Optimizing your databases can help maintain swift and responsive site performance. Meow Apps offers a free Database cleaner plugin. Always be sure to run a local backup, or even better, a full server backup, before using tools like this!

Media Library Management: Over time, WordPress sites accumulate unused or duplicated media files. This is especially true for museum websites. Cleaning up your media library not only conserves space but also enhances page loading times. We recommend a few different tools for cleaning up the media library. WPMUDEV has a paid plugin called Smush that will compress all your files. Additionally, Meow Apps offers a Media Cleaner plugin which will remove unused files. Finally, the Media Deduper plugin will find duplicate images (which happens a lot with WordPress Media) and consolidate duplicates into one instance of an image. Again always run backups before using these tools.

Broken Links and Orphaned Content: Identifying and rectifying broken links and removing irrelevant content are crucial steps in improving your site’s usability and SEO. The free Online Broken Link Checker at Brokenlinkcheck.com will spider your website and find any old broken links so you can update these pages. Tools like Yoast SEO Premium can also help you identify any orphaned pages which should either be deleted or at least removed from site search results using a plugin like Search Exclude by Quadlayers.

Image Display Optimization: Proper sizing and optimization of images on WordPress are essential for faster load times and better SEO. You see, when you upload an image WordPress creates a number of different thumbnail sizes so that you can pick the best intrinsic size to the most fitting display size. For example, if you are adding an image as a thumbnail within a three column layout you would want to set that image to use a smaller thumbnail size. But if you leave a placed image with its default full size setting, you will be forcing browsers to download large files to display in small views. WordPress gives you the option to choose which Image resolution to use on a case by case basis. You can also use a tool like Simple Image Sizes to create custom thumbnail sizes to more closely match your page layouts.

Additional Clean Up Tasks: An annual review of page speeds, plugin management, and server configurations are integral parts of a thorough WordPress website tune-up, ensuring each aspect of your site is optimized for peak efficiency.

Cuberis Maintenance and Annual WordPress Tune-Up PlanCuberis provides monthly maintenance for our museum clients which covers regular updating of plugins and WordPress core. However we also offer an annual tune up plan to ensure that our sites are efficient and optimized. Our plan involves an initial audit and optimization, followed by Media Library cleanups, optimizations, and content fixes. We deliver reports on each tune-up’s status and findings, allowing you to stay informed and address any identified issues.

Adopting Museum WordPress Sites for Support and Tune-UpsWhile the majority of our museum clients consist of sites we’ve designed and built, we occasionally adopt existing museum WordPress sites into our support program. Additionally, we’ve performed a number of WordPress platform conversions, where an existing museum site’s content and design are not in need of redesign, but where the underlying WordPress theme and architecture are not flexible enough and need more dynamic capabilities.

If your museum’s website requires deep cleaning and more proactive support, contact us. We can conduct an initial audit to determine if we can incorporate your site into our support services and perform a comprehensive tune-up.

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The holidays are here, and museums are some of the best places to find unique gifts for loved ones. Purchasing a gift from a museum is a great way of supporting a museum financially, and museum members often qualify for discounts.

Still need to finish your shopping? Check out our gift guide below!

For Friends & Family
For the Tree
For the Kitchen
For the Dining Room
For the Library
For Her
For Him
For Kids
For the Book Lover
For the Baseball Fan
For the Rocky Fan
For the Creative Builder
For the Punster
For the Board Game Enthusiast
For the American Patriot
For Drawing & Writing
For Rainy Days
For the Museum Lover

1. For Friends & FamilyArt-Themed Holiday Cards from the Detroit Institute of Arts – Enjoy holiday variations on classic works of art, including “The Persistence of Marry,” “Season’s Magritte-ings,” and more.

Pop-Up Holiday Cards from the Museum of Modern Art – For decades, the MoMA has been inviting artists to create beautiful unique holiday cards, which have become works of art in themselves.

2. For the TreeLouis C. Tiffany Flora Cloisonné Ornaments from the Met – Each ornament replicates a different work by Louis C. Tiffany on display at the Met—two from lampshades, and one from a window panel.

3. For the KitchenGuggenheim Spiral Teapot from the Guggenheim Museum – Steep tea in style with this porcelain teapot, part of a collection that also includes a sugar and creamer set.

4. For the Dining RoomSnowflake Plates from the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation – Handcrafted from clay using the same techniques artisans used in the 17th and 18th centuries, these plates are perfect for serving holiday treats.

5. For the LibraryT-Rex Fossil Bookends from the American Museum of Natural History – Keep your book collection from going extinct with these majestic T-Rex Fossil Bookends, a thrilling gift for dinosaur enthusiasts.

6. For HerVan Gogh Irises Silk Scarf from the Getty Museum – Drape yourself in Van Gogh’s iconic Irises with this stunning 100% silk scarf, featuring vibrant colors and intricate brushstrokes.

Chatty Feet Artist Socks Set from the MoMA Design Store – Take a walk through art history with this whimsical set of socks featuring Andy Sock-Hole, Frida Callus, Feetasso, and Vincent Van Toe.

Jewelry Inspired by Ancient Egypt from the Field Museum – Discover through treasures inspired by the Field Museum’s collection, from replicas of ancient artifacts to personalized hieroglyphic necklaces.

7. For HimAviator Style Smoke Sunglasses from the Air Force Museum – Choose from six styles of sunglasses and channel your inner Maverick.

Jackson Pollock Tie from the Museum of the City of New York – Inspired by Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism, this tie also has the advantage of making ketchup stains less noticeable.

Rosetta Stone Cufflinks from the British Museum – These steel cufflinks show off one of the greatest discoveries in history.

8. For KidsLion Plush and Lion Snow Globe from the Art Institute of Chicago – The Art Institute of Chicago’s iconic lion statues are the inspiration behind these adorable gifts—as well as dozens of other items.

Youth Christmas Tree Rex Bundle with Gift Box from the Field Museum – One of many holiday gift sets and bundles, the “Tree Rex” gift set includes a stylish red sweatshirt, plush, lollipop, and sticker.

9. For the Book LoverHighlights from the National Gallery of Art– Explore 400+ National Gallery masterpieces with vivid pictures and insightful explanations.

Women at Ground Zero: Stories of Courage and Compassion from the 9/11 Memorial & Museum – This book tells the story of September 11 from a rarely heard perspective—that of the women who were there, providing relief and support to victims and rescue workers.

Midway Memories: The Official Collection of the San Diego Aircraft Carrier Museum– Witness life aboard the USS Midway through 200 unpublished photographs by Midway sailors. Signed by the author.

10. For the Baseball FanAutographed Memorabilia from the National Baseball Hall of Fame – Browse an extensive collection of signed baseball cards, bats, photos, and more.

11. For the Rocky* Fan“Philadelphia’s Champion” Gifts from the Philadelphia Museum of Art* – Commemorate Rocky’s iconic run up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art with a sweatshirt, socks, keychain, and other items.

12. For the Creative BuilderLeonardo da Vinci’s Flying Machine Kit from the National Gallery of Art – Rediscover Leonardo’s flying machine with this working model and 48-page book.

LEGO Ideas The Starry Night from the MoMA Design Store – This 2,316 piece LEGO set reimagines Van Gogh’s masterpiece in a unique way and was created in conjunction with the MoMA, where visitors can view the original painting.

13. For the Punster“I Need My Space” Gifts from the Kennedy Space Center – Shop a wide variety of mugs, apparel, and more with this punny phrase.

“Be Rational,” “Get Real” T-Shirt from the California Science Center – Perfect for your favorite math geek.

14. For the Board Game EnthusiastWorld War II Clue from the National WWII Museum – “World War II Clue: Spies and Espionage Edition” is a fun and unique variation on the classic game.

15. For the American Patriot U.S. Flag Flown Over the 9/11 Memorial from the 9/11 Memorial & Museum – Honor the heroes of 9/11 with an authentic U.S. flag flown over the Memorial, packaged with a personalized certificate of authenticity.

16. For Drawing & WritingBlackwing x PMA: Duchamp Edition Pencils from the Philadelphia Museum of Art – In 1950, Marcel Duchamp helped donate his patrons’ collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and this exclusive Blackwing set honors 12 key works with a black-and-white design that reflects his love of chess.

17. For Rainy DaysMonet Water Lilies Umbrella from the National Gallery of Art – Stay dry with Monet’s Water Lilies.

18. For the Museum LoverThe Museum: From its Origins to the 21st Century, by Owen Hopkins – This immersive book traces the fascinating history of museums, from early collections to today’s global institutions like the Louvre and Guggenheim, revealing the motivations of the architects, curators, and patrons who shaped their evolution.

Gift Membership to Your Local Museum – Last but not least, a museum membership is great way to inspire future adventures.

Merry Christmas!

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Browsing a website has a lot in common with setting foot in a museum, especially when it comes to navigation. While one museum visitor may know precisely where she wants to go, and another may be content simply to explore, what both visitors have in common is a need for a good map. The first visitor needs to quickly discover how to get to her desired destination, and the second needs to develop a broad idea of what is available. In either case, the map helps them to reach their goal.

A good website, likewise, allows for easy and straightforward navigation for whatever type of user comes to the site. As we have written previously (People Don’t Read on the Web, and Other Fallacies), website visitors may come looking for different levels of information—to “skim,” to “swim,” or to “dive”—and it is essential to provide a navigational system that keeps all three types of users in mind.

What does it look like when a museum does this well? In this article we survey examples of sites with effectively and skillfully designed navigation systems using seven key principles:

Create a Simple Menu with Drop-Down Options
Keep the Menu Visible as the User Scrolls
Consider Using a Mega Menu
Implement the Rule of Sevens
Break a Long Page into Sections
Use Tags, Categories, and Related Content
Use Effective Calls to Action

(While this article does not focus on mobile versions of sites, the same principles can be adapted and applied for those as well.)

1. Create a Simple Menu with Drop-Down Options

The Cleveland Museum of Art features a simple and clean navigation menu with submenu options that pop up when the user hovers over the link. A magnifying glass icon simplifies the option for performing a search.

The Getty’s website is similar and also adds small arrows next to each menu item to indicate to the user that more options are available. Some websites feature arrows that pop up when the user hovers. Since users are accustomed to seeing submenus come up, arrows are not strictly necessary, but they can be a helpful indication that more is included in the navigation menu, especially if some links contain dropdowns and others do not.

The Whitney Museum of American Art adds a brief description to each submenu link, adding helpful contrast by setting the title in bold and the description in regular type.

Sometimes a menu link goes to a separate site that pops up in a new tab. The Met adds a subtle feature by making a small diagonal arrow pop up when the user hovers over the word “Shop.”

(Having a link open in a new tab should be used sparingly and intentionally. A website that makes every link open in a new tab is likely to frustrate visitors.)

2. Keep the Menu Visible as the User Scrolls

This is more of a preference than a rule, but keeping the menu visible at all times can make a site easier to navigate. This type of “Fixed Header” or “Sticky Header” can be seen in the animated screenshots below, including the Asian Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the LACMA.

With a fixed header, the site designer can choose which part of the header remains visible, and at what size. For example, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston retains only a smaller version of their logo and two call to action buttons:

If it is decided that keeping the menu visible requires too much space, it is also possible to have the menu disappear when the user is scrolling down, but then reappear when the user scrolls back up, as happens on the Louvre’s website:

3. Consider Using a Mega Menu

A mega menu allows a submenu to include more content, including images, organized into multiple columns. We have previously written about their advantages in Museums and Mega Menus.

The USS Midway Museum, the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and the Tate are among museums that use mega menus. For each of these sites, the mega menu appears when the user hovers over one of the top menu links:

4. Implement the “Rule of Sevens”

At some point an excessive number of links becomes overwhelming—but how many is too many? The “rule of sevens” states that because seven is the maximum number of items we can retain in our short-term memory, it is a helpful limit when presenting someone with new information. (Think, for instance, of the way that telephone numbers—apart from area codes—are limited to seven digits.)

On a website, seven or fewer menu items is a good rule of thumb. Submenus should also be limited to seven or, if using a mega menu, they can be divided into sections of seven.

What if more than seven links are needed? These examples from the Natural History Museum and the Smithsonian show how they can be offset in a different row, visually putting them into a different category of options, to keep the menu from becoming too overwhelming to visitors.

5. Break a Long Page into Sections

Dividing a page into small sections using subheadings significantly helps users find what they’re looking for, especially if they’re in skimming mode, and especially if the page is long.

Subheadings typically simply consist of lines of larger text and/or different color above paragraphs of regular-sized text, as we’ve done in this article. But there are other creative methods that enable quick skimming as well. Consider how the Nasher Museum uses columns, with subheadings to the left of each section:

The same website highlights featured articles using a different background color:

Links can be provided to separate sections of the page using anchor links. The Louvre does this in a creative way by combining anchor links with a fixed header so users can easily keep track of their bearings on the page:

Another effective divide a page that has a lot of images is to make use of horizontal scrolling. On the Met’s Visiting Guide for its Winslow Homer exhibition, sections alternate between paragraphs of text and sections of “Selected Artworks” that are only one row—thus keeping the vertical length of the page shorter—while allowing the user to scroll sideways to view more image.

There are many ways to divide a page, but the key is to make it easily accessible for a user who is quickly scrolling to see what content is available.

6. Use Tags, Categories, and Related Content

So far, we have considered how to organize navigation from a bird’s eye view to help visitors find what they’re looking for or see how the site is broadly organized. We might consider this a top-down approach.

A bottom-up approach is also appropriate, in which we help visitors to take a deeper dive into available content. One such method is the strategic use of tags, categories, and other indicators of related content.

The Minneapolis Museum of Art, for instance, features “Related Events” and “Related Blogs” links on their pages. A visitor interested in their exhibition on Native Photography would see in the sidebar automatically-generated links to the next public tour as well as a blog post related to the exhibition.

A blog is an ideal place for categorizing pages. The Ackland Art Museum’s blog articles allow visitors to browse by categories both broad (top left) and specific (bottom right).

Content can be categorized in a variety of ways, some more expected and some more whimsical. The National Museum of Asian Art tags artwork according to “Themes,” “Colors,” and “Materials & Techniques,” and also by feeling or mood: “Calming,” “Unexpected,” “Inspiring,” “Joyful,” “Cute,” and “Funny.”

7. Use Effective Calls to Action

Finally, an effective call to action (CTA) can help direct visitors to specific parts of a site. Our previous article on CTAs focused on how to put an call to action in the header, but they can also be effective as part of the main body of the site.

The National Gallery, Vizcaya Museum & Gardens, and NC Arboretum all provide helpful examples of how to use effective CTA buttons.

Conclusion: Improving the Map

Now, take a few moments to browse your museum’s website from the perspective of different visitors:

Skimmers: Visitors interested in quickly seeing what is available at the site by quickly looking through headers and menu options
Swimmers: Visitors interested in spending a little more time exploring the content of the site in more detail.
Divers: Visitors willing to invest significant time reading articles, watching videos, and locating specific information.

Will each type of visitor be able to find his or her way around the site with ease? How does the current navigational structure help or hinder their experience?

Your museum features maps that effectively inform visitors of where there are and where they might go next, and your website should do the same.

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A visitor to a content-rich museum website, like a customer at a bookstore, can easily spend long periods of time simply browsing around. For the bookstore owner, the customer’s visit ideally leads to a simple conclusion: purchasing a book. For the museum, the website user’s visit should also have an ideal objective. Typically, this objective is one (or more) of the following: purchasing tickets, becoming a member, making a donation, or planning a visit.

An effective design tool that helps prompt visitors toward an objective is a clear Call to Action (CTA), often in the form of a strategically-placed button. Many popular websites feature such CTAs. Consider the homepages of Netflix and Chipotle:

Where is your eye drawn on these pages? It’s hard to miss the bright red buttons that read “Sign In” and “Get Started” (Netflix) and “Order Now” (Chipotle), which prominently invite users to click on them.

CTAs are known to increase conversion rates. Statistics vary about how much of a difference they make—and the difference surely varies from industry to industry—but that they would be effective is simply common sense. Website visitors often come a site and immediately feel bombarded with a massive amount of information. Nudging them to a particular page helps clarify where they should go.

Museum CTAs – Common (and Best) PracticesWe visited 40 museum websites (for a list, scroll to the bottom of this article) to survey common practices with CTAs.

(Note: In this article we are focusing on CTAs that are visible “above the fold” on laptops and desktops—that is, ones that show up on the homepage before a user begins scrolling. We will look at other types of CTAs in another article.)

Here’s what we found:

78% of museum websites feature a Call to Action
58% of museum websites feature a Call to Action in the top right corner
50% of museum websites feature a Call to Action further down in the middle of the page (usually in the hero image)

The three most common CTAs in the top right corner ask visitors to purchase tickets, place membership, or make a donation:

CTAs further down in the middle of the page (but still above the fold) focus on learning more about the particular event featured on the top of the homepage, purchasing tickets, or general visit planning:

The best CTA may differ from museum to museum, and could even change depending on the time of year. A museum with free admission, for instance, might focus on membership or donations rather than ticket sales. And in November or December, a CTA to purchase gift memberships for friends or family members could prove effective.

However the CTA is used, the key is to be intentional about why one option is being chosen over another.

A Word on Hesitation About CTAsSome museums may wonder whether a direct Call to Action is fitting for their website. After all, aren’t museums fundamentally educational institutions, and isn’t a CTA about trying to sell something? Will website visitors be put off if they feel like they are being pushed by the museum to spend money? Perhaps they should simply be allowed to browse around the site without being directed in one direction or another. Maybe a Call to Action is more appropriate for a commercial site.

It is certainly possible to create CTAs in a way that irritates visitors. A flashy popup window that appears every time a visitor loads a new page is not the way to go. Asking for donations in a way that reeks of desperation may also be counterproductive.

For this reason, it is important to think of CTAs in the right way—as something helpful to both the museum and the website visitor. A CTA can be thought of as a sign pointing clearly toward a particular part of the site where a visitor can do something (buy at ticket, purchase a membership) that he or she already has an inclination to do. When Chipotle makes “ORDER NOW” the center of attention on its homepage, it is making the user experience simpler for the many visitors who have come to the site desiring to place an order. Similarly, a museum that makes links to ticket sales, memberships, or donations stand out prominently is helping users to find what they are looking for—or, in some cases, to recognize or remember a request that they are happy to fulfill.

There is an art to a well-placed and effective CTA which is fundamentally a matter of design. Let’s turn now to some good examples of CTAs on museum websites.

Best Practices & ExamplesStylistically, effective CTAs should be characterized by:

Strategic placement
Clear and concise language
Visual prominence
Strategic Placement

By tracking the eye movements of website visitors, researchers have found that our eyes often move in a z-shaped pattern across a page. We start in the top left, move to the top right, then go down to the bottom left, and end at the bottom right.

This phenomenon is related to what has been called the Gutenberg Pattern or Gutenberg Diagram:

Source: https://downthelinedesign.co.uk/effective-website-design-gutenberg-diagram/

The Netflix example given above uses this z-shaped pattern to draw the user’s attention to the two red CTA buttons:

Many museum websites use the same pattern for their own homepages. Consider these examples and note the positioning of the CTA buttons, with variations on the z-pattern:

Not every website must follow this same pattern, though it can serve as a helpful starting point. The key is that CTA positioning be strategic.

Clear and Concise Language

Generally, a simple word or short phrase is sufficient for a Call to Action. “Tickets” might be phrased as “Get Tickets” or “Buy Tickets.” For a link to an exhibition page, “Learn More” is sufficient; an entire sentence like “Find out more about the exhibition,” as one site does, is not typically necessary.

Concise language is especially important for CTAs in the top right corner of a page, where there is not likely much space to work with in the first place.

Visual Prominence

Since a CTA needs to be quickly noticed, it should be visually prominent. CTAs that receive more clicks have the following characteristics:

Button – A button, not simply a text link.
Color – A color that stands out from the rest of the page. Some studies suggest that the best color is red, but this may not always be the case. The best practice is whatever color contrasts well with the rest of the page.
White Space – Removing clutter and increasing the space around a button has been shown to increase clicks.
Fewer, Not More – Too many CTAs can reduce conversion rates.

There are other ways to draw attention to a CTA. A pop-up window or header, as featured on the 9/11 Memorial & Museum and American Museum of Natural History sites, can temporarily feature a push to encourage visitors to register, donate, join, etc.

Finally, a more creative design, as shown below, can draw an additional degree of attention to a CTA. It is impossible to miss the large “Become a Member” button, which pops out of the page.

Conclusion: Improving Your Call to ActionMuch more has been said about the best practices for Call to Action buttons, and this article has not even touched on the ways they can be used on other parts of a site.

As you reassess your site’s need for a strategic CTA, consider these questions:

What are our conversion objectives? Where do we want to direct users when they come to our site? What do we want them to do?
Do we have a system that can measure conversion rates? If we add a CTA or modify our current one, how will we evaluate its effectiveness?
Likewise, how are users currently browsing the site? Are they visiting the pages we want them to visit?
If we are using CTA buttons, do they have these important characteristics: (1) Strategic placement, (2) Clear and concise language, and (3) Visual prominence?

Not every website has to implement a Call to Action the exact same way, placing CTA buttons in identical positions. But they can be an important tool in designing a well-planned site, and are certainly a helpful part of the discussion.

Museum websites visited in this study:

9/11 Memorial & Museum
American Museum of Natural History
Art Institute Chicago
Asian Art Museum
Blanton Museum of Art
British Museum
Brooklyn Museum
California Science Center
Cleveland Museum of Art
Detroit Institute of Arts
Field Museum
Getty
Guggenheim
Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation
Houston Museum of Natural Science
Kennedy Space Center
LACMA
Louvre
MFA Boston
Minneapolis Institute of Art
MoMA
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Museum of Science
National Baseball Hall of Fame
National Gallery of Art
National Museum of American History
National Museum of Natural History
National Museum of the US Air Force
Natural History Museum
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Tampa Museum of Art
Tate Modern
The Children’s Museum
The Met
The National Gallery (UK)
The National WWII Museum
US Holocaust Memorial Museum
USS Midway Museum
Victoria and Albert Museum
Whitney

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The most enjoyable presidential debate I ever watched was between two candidates who had been dead for nearly two hundred years: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. At this lively event, held at the North Carolina Museum of History five years ago, the two former presidents explored a wide variety of controversies on subjects like freedom …

Is AI the New Frontier of “Edutainment” for Museums? Read More »

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In Beyond the Bake Sale: Fundraising for Local History Organizations, fundraising expert Jamie Simek has written a practical and thorough guide designed to help small cultural heritage organizations improve their strategies for raising money. Drawing from her experience at organizations like the Indiana Historical Society, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, and the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Simek has written a valuable read for local museums ready to take the next step in improving their fundraising strategies.

In the digital age, one key to successful fundraising is, of course, an effective online giving platform. In prior years, fundraising happened primarily through the mail. As recently as 2010 Simek notes, half of all donations were still sent through the mail; by 2018, that number had gone down to 23%. (Today, it is even less.) A variety of online platforms have taken the place of snail mail, including not only traditional websites but also donations via social media and SMS texts.

Simek’s advice for building an effective online donation platform can be broken into three broad categories: (1) Make your donation page appealing and user-friendly, (2) Choose the right software for processing donations, and (3) Review donation data to assess and improve fundraising strategies.

Sounds straightforward, enough, right?

Not quite.

The challenge, Simek writes, is this:

While there are many options for online donation platforms…researching the best solution for your organization may take some time. The many available choices can seem a bit overwhelming.

It’s true—just like with other products, the wide variety of options available can be both a blessing and a curse. Out of all the options out there, one will wonder, which has the features we need? Which is the right cost? Which can we get up and running fairly quickly? Which will have the optimal compatibility with our existing systems?

Speaking of compatibility, this question raises another challenge: how many different applications, software packages, and subscriptions do we already have, and how excited are we about adding yet another? Perhaps we use one service for mailing lists, another for online ticket sales, another for overseeing collection management systems, another for tracking membership records, and another for who-knows-what. Keeping all these records straight can be time-consuming, and without the ability to seamlessly integrate them, helpful insights that could come from effective data analysis will be lost.

An Integrated WordPress Solution to Fundraising NeedsThe good news is that for many organizations, the best online donation platform may be already available—and hiding right under their noses.

For years WordPress has been the go-to platform for website development. Since 2012, it has grown from 15.8% of all content management systems to 43.1% in 2023. Data collected in 2019 showed that out of the 143 museums most-visited in the U.S., about 32% were using WordPress.

One of WordPress’s best features, its plugins, have radically expanded its capabilities. One of its most popular plugins, WooCommerce, has grown to become the most widely-used e-commerce platform in the world.

What fewer people know is that, out of the tens of thousands of plugins WordPress offers, a small handful of fantastic new plugins can streamline an organization’s donor, membership, sales, CRM, email campaign, and data evaluation needs.

Let’s take a look at just two: FluentCRM and GiveWP.

FluentCRMReleased in 2020, FluentCRM is a self-hosted email marketing automation plugin for WordPress. It not websites the power to create a detailed database of users that can be used to send email campaigns (as a potential replacement for MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc.) and integrates this database with other plugins like WooCommerce, MemberPress, and LearnDash that handle online ticketing, membership, donations, and learning management systems. It also provides detailed statistics to help organizations assess and improve their marketing strategies.

Here are some ways FluentCRM can help organizations improve their fundraising strategies:

Email Campaign Management

If effective fundraising requires making sure the right people get the right message at the right time, an email blast to everyone on a mailing list will be limited in its effectiveness. But the more customizable email campaigns are, the better. Because of its integration capabilities, FluentCRM can easily allow the creation of precise and customized emails based on online purchases, member and donor traits, prior responsiveness to email campaigns, and more. Automated emails can be set to trigger when particular conditions are met. For instance, the submission of a form could trigger the following sequence:

Email automation can also be associated with WooCommerce purchases:

If this is what FluentCRM can do with WooCommerce, imagine what it can do with a membership platform like MemberPress or a donor platform like GiveWP. When a user signs up for a museum’s membership, makes a donation, responds to a survey, purchases something from an online store, or registers for a webinar, a complete pre-written marketing campaign can automatically activate.

Data Management & Reports

Next, having implemented a donation strategy, it’s time to assess the results. In Beyond the Bake Sale, Jamie Simek describes how important this is:

Track Your Results: Put plans in code to track appeal responses in your database. More data can equal better strategy. Ideally, you’d like to be able to take into account factors such as how many years a person has given (longevity), the number of gifts given in a year (frequency), the dollar value (amount), as well as when the last gift was given (recency). By tracking this information, you can start identifying patterns, including total giving and average gift ranges.

While this kind of information can provide crucial insights, “your data will only be as good as the records you keep.” Tracking data and integrating data from various sources are both keys to good record-keeping.

Simek recommends taking the following six steps for evaluating data effectively. This list is helpful in evaluating an online CRM/donor platform, as we may ask, “Can it help us to take each of these steps as effectively and seamlessly as possible?”

ID Primary Users – Who are our members, supporters, visitors, etc.? What do we know about them that will help us develop the best strategies?
Determine What You Need to Know – What does success look like, and what data should be collected to assess the degree of its attainment?
Identify Useful Indicators – What specific and measurable results will indicate success?
Collect, Document, and Manage – How will we capture the data we need, and do we have an effective system in place for storing and managing it?
Analyze the Data – What quantitative and qualitative conclusions can we draw from our data?
Share Your Findings – Once our data has been analyzed, how can we take the most important parts and summarize them effectively?
Reflect, Learn, and Adjust – Did we capture the right data, was it useful, and how can we improve our strategy going forward?

That FluentCRM is a great example of an effective CRM/donor platform may be seen in the way it meets these needs. First, its capabilities help clarify what can be measured, thus helping to determine what should be measured. Second, its integrated user information provides instant insights into a user’s purchase, membership, donation, and email open rate and click-through patterns, allowing key users to be identified. Finally, its reports and analytics provide the ability to assess what to do with the data that has been collected and to export it through graphs and charts for intelligible circulation.

Reports & AnalyticsTracking User DataIntegrating with Plugins like MemberPressConnecting to a High-Quality Donation Plugin – GiveWPFluentCRM has built-in integration capabilities with dozens of plugins, and plugins like WPFusion or Uncanny Automator allow it to integrate with many others.

GiveWP is a top online donation plugin widely used by nonprofits. Like FluentCRM (and especially when combined with FluentCRM), it provides the tools organizations need for effective fundraising that we saw in Beyond the Bake Sale:

Attractive and user-friendly donation pages are easy to configure and feature customizable forms. Users can make one-time or recurring donations. Peer-to-Peer and Text-to-Give options are available.
Data and reports are easy to access.GiveWP provides overview of individual donors, summaries of fundraising campaigns, data about donation trends over time, and more. Data can be published in graphs and charts or exported as CSV files. When integrated with FluentCRM, all of this information can be combined with data from other sources like WooCommerce or MemberPress.

Screenshots of GiveWP’s FeaturesThe Beauty of Online GivingAt the end of the day, what matters most for any museum is that it has the tools it needs to accomplish its mission. As we have seen, WordPress is revolutionizing online giving by providing organizations with unique CRM and fundraising tools which, if configured effectively, will save time and money while also providing key insights into member and visitor habits and needs.

Jamie Simek closes Beyond the Bake Sale with the following encouragement, reminding us why we do what we do:

Most of us do this work because we love local history, and we want to protect and share it with others. The efforts we make today will ensure that history is still available for future generations. The work we do is important and worthy of support.

Thanks to WordPress, the tools we need to gather that support are here—and they are better than ever.

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How WordPress Is Revolutionizing Online Giving appeared first on Cuberis - Museum Website Design and Development.

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In its December 1995 issue, Art in America ran a cover story about a new technology that was beginning to transform the world of museums: something called the “World Wide Web.” Today, this article—The Art World (and I) Go On Line, by Robert Atkins—makes for an insightful and somewhat nostalgic read. For those who remember the exciting early days of the internet—logging on with a dial-up modem through Prodigy, Compuserve, or America Online; browsing the web with Netscape; searching with Webcrawler, Locos, or Infoseek—much will sound familiar. These were the days in which anything that took up more than a gigabyte of hard drive space was considered “gargantuan.” Looking back now, nearly thirty years later, many of Atkins’ observations continue to be relevant. Although in 1995 fewer than one in ten Americans were online, the advent of the World Wide Web had “already profoundly affected museums and libraries,” and of course continues to do so today.

Reading an article like this prompts us to ask: just how much have museum websites changed in the past three decades, how will they likely change in the future, and how can museums keep up? These are some of the questions we will explore in this article. But first, let’s take a fun look at a few popular museum websites then and now.

The American Museum of Natural History2. The Art Institute of Chicago3. The Guggenheim4. The Louvre5. Minneapolis Institute of Art6. National Gallery of Art7. The New Museum8. The Prado9. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art10. The Metropolitan Museum of ArtThe conclusion is inescapable: website design has come a long way over the years!

Returning to our 1995 Art in America article: even then, Atkins identified five major characteristics of web design and tech developments that sounds familiar to us today. Reading over them can remind us of some of the continual pattens and trends of internet content and can prompt us to reflect on how effective and impactful our own website are.

1) More museums needed to take advantage of the full power of the web.

Atkins wrote, “Unfortunately, most museums seem to regard their Internet outposts mainly as vehicles for the dissemination of publicity and programming information, rather than education or viewer interaction.”

A decent website is basically a company brochure, but a great website takes full advantage of the latest technologies and techniques. This was true in then, and it is true now.

Question for museums today: To what degree have we tapped into the latest innovations to provide our users with the best content and experience possible, going beyond minimal posting of information?

2) Keeping a website up to date is always a challenge…

“The constantly expanding Louvre site now showcases reproductions of the museum’s Vermeers. But the museum’s on-line exhibition schedule is hopelessly out-of-date, underscoring the necessity of constant maintenance and up-dating.”

Remember the “Under Construction” GIFs of ’90s websites? What began as an apology for a website that was still work in progress disappeared when we acknowledged that every website is always a work in progress due to the dynamic nature of the web. This also means that, both then and now, the quickest way to suggest one’s irrelevance is to allow a website to become out of date.

Question for museums today: How often do we update our website—including our blog, social media, and video posts? What is our strategy for content management?

3) …but the speed of the internet is a game-changer when it is taken advantage of.

Today, it is easy to forget how much the internet revolutionized the speed that information became available. In 1995, Atkins found it amazing and worth noting that the University Art Museum featured information and images on an exhibition before the paper catalog was printed! The French Ministry of Culture, similarly, featured a few finding of Paleolithic cave paintings. “The caves were re-discovered last Christmas and the web site—with four gorgeous reproductions from the inaccessible caves—was up less than two months later.”

Question for museums today: Is our website (including the blog, social media posts, etc.) not only not out of date, but also a resource where people know they will find the latest, news, trends, and ideas?

4) Online message boards and live online chats were tremendous innovations (but had trouble living up to their potential).

Long before YouTube, Twitter, or blogging sites, the internet had an experimental time for interactive features on websites. This is how Atkins describes a message board run by the Whitney museum, which rather boldly referred to itself as an “ongoing conference”:

The Whitney is the second museum to host an ongoing conference on a bulletin board. (Only the Smithsonian’s conference on America Online has been in existence longer.) Museum curators and guests occasionally log on for real-time chat events, but the conference mostly provides ongoing bulletin-board style hosts discussions…

I discovered that one can initially read months of old postings and then decide whether or not to add to the “conversation.” Unfortunately, the level of discussion is almost invariably pretty unfocused, and more-than-vaguely reminiscent of all-night, college bull sessions.

Atkins went on to identify two of the main barriers to quality conversations online, ones that will sound familiar to internet users today: the “unnuanced quality vis-à-vis spoken conversation” of online chatting and posting, and the “anonymity” which decreases users’ feelings of responsibility for what they post. Another anecdote recounts a special event in which the artist Jenny Holzer went live on America Online to interact with audience members and answer their questions.

Although the technology that allowed for this sort of interaction was impressive, the event was impaired by the low-quality discussion and questions from the audience, which “consisted primarily of Beavis and Butthead-style remarks supplied by audience members who understood neither Holzer nor her art.”

Today, interaction with users typically happens through social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Special events hosted over Zoom have superseded old AOL-style chats. While we are all too familiar with the kind of online drivel Atkins encountered in the mid-’90s, we have, fortunately, come a long way in discovering how to manage online interactions in a way that is truly effective and positive for users and visitors.

Question for museums today: How well do we intentionally and effectively interact with users online in a way that builds a sense of community and provides opportunity for interaction with artists and museum staff?

5) Organizations that didn’t anticipate new technological trends were losing out.

Finally, Atkins noted that some technological trends—even relatively recent ones—were already giving way to even newer ones. Remember CD-ROMs? This short-lived technology was on its way out almost immediately after surging in popularity and usefulness:

The Christmas sales figures on CD-ROMs were disastrous…Many observers believe that this non-interactive digital format is transitional and that the real explosion of electronic, multi-media publishing will be located on the Internet…My recent experience is typical: The publishers of my contemporary- and modern-art guides, ArtSpeak and ArtSpoke, are ambivalent about spending the several hundred thousands dollars necessary to produce a CD-ROM version.

In the mid-’90s, many companies were investing enormous amounts of money in CD-ROMs. (A few readers might even remember CD-ROM magazines.) These organizations saw the genuine potential of this new technology, but unfortunately failed to recognize the even greater potential of the internet.

Question for museums today: How closely do we follow the latest technological trends, and can we recognize ones that sound promising but are destined to disappear as quickly as they came?

Three Decades of Innovation: New Opportunities, New NeedsSince 1995, the continual development of internet technology has created new opportunities and new needs. Consider just a few which we have written about previously:

| New Opportunity | New Need | | --- | --- | | 1. High-speed internet access has increased the number of images and videos on websites | Better Media Management | | 2. Blogging, Social Media, YouTube | Effective Content Strategy Habits | | 3. Content Management Systems like WordPress | The Low Code / No Code Revolution | | 4. The digitization of production assets | Efficient Digital Asset Management Systems | | 5. A staggering number of resources online, accessible through search engines with complex algorithms | Strategies for effective Search Engine Performance |

What’s next? How will the internet continue to evolve in coming years? Which widely-discussed technologies currently in development—virtual reality, augmented reality, and the metaverse—will revolutionize our we experience museums online, and which less visible or not yet invented ones might make an even larger impact?

One breakthrough happening today (which we will discuss more in an upcoming article—stay tuned!) is the way WordPress is allowing organizations to integrate and simplify the way they manage their multifaceted relationship with visitors. WordPress may have become the go-to application for website development, but most view it as just one of many applications that organizations have to juggle as they try to keep up with mailing lists, manage online ticket sales and donations, keep track of membership records, oversee collection management systems, and meet other customer relationship management needs.

What if all of these needs could be met in a single application—within WordPress itself? That technology is available now! Consider the way these plugins could allow your museum to drive the entire operation for customer relations through WordPress:

• FluentCRM – Administer all of your email marketing from your WordPress dashboard. Manage leads and customers, email campaigns, automated email sequencing, learner and affiliate management, and monitor user activities and many more in one place.

• GiveWP – Easily create customized donation pages. GiveWP provides you with an intuitive way to accept donations online through your own WordPress site with a variety of payment methods available in multiple countries.

• WooCommerce – Manage online shopping through WordPress. WooCommerce includes features for product listings, payment processing, and order management, as well as a wide range of customization options.

• MemberPress – Create, manage and track membership subscriptions and sell digital products; grant and revoke access to posts, pages, categories, tags, feeds, communities and digital files based on what products your users have purchased or subscribed to. Leverage all of the features of WordPress and WordPress plugins including content management, forums and social communities.

As plugins like these make customer relation management simpler, more efficient, and less expensive, organizations can free up valuable time and resources to redirect toward more essential needs.

Wherever the future takes us, what we wrote a few years ago in Preparing Your Museum for Technological Breakthrough still holds true. Planning ahead means not only keeping up with new technologies as they arrive, but imagining and anticipating the innovative ways users will be able to digitally experience your museum before they are here:

My suggestion is to start talking and planning for this today, as if all the tools were already available. Start working now on content strategies, story prioritization, wish lists for augmented media like audio and video, and contextual object relationships. Wouldn’t it be great, if by the time your site has all these tools available, that you already had several online-curated features ready to showcase? Content creation is, and always has been, a challenging part of website development. With the new expansion of possibilities in front of museums, that challenge will be greater than ever. Best start now.

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Today, everyone has purchased a membership to something. Online subscriptions to Netflix or Spotify, access to a local gym or golf club, that special ID card that serves as an admission ticket to Costco—the appeal of membership is easy to see because of the clear and widely-appealing benefits each of these offer to those who purchase them.

Museum membership? For the average person, the benefits of museum membership—if one even knows it exists in the first place—is more mysterious. Why purchase a membership if admission is free or has already been paid for by a ticket? Is purchasing a membership primarily an act of charity, comparable to making a donation? Or is it primarily a means of gaining special privileges? What ultimate value does a membership offer? And how can museums do an effective job helping visitors understand the answers to these questions?

The good news is that a museum’s website offers an ideal space to alert visitors to the benefits of membership while driving home its purpose. By placing information about membership in strategic places on their websites, museums can effectively inform and remind visitors that purchasing a museum membership is mutually beneficial for both the visitor and the museum.

In this article, we will explore some of the ways museum websites are doing this well. But first, we should take a moment to re-evaluate some of the purposes that museum membership exists in the first place.

Thinking Through the Purpose and Appeal of MembershipMemberships are good for museums in many respects, but not all museums have thoroughly explored strategies for how and why they promote it. An article at museumprogress.com encourages museum leaders to carefully consider three big questions:

Why do your members join?
How does a member’s “why” for joining affect their behavior?
What kind of member do you want to attract?

We should keep in mind that the answers to questions one and two may vary from member to member. Different ages groups may find membership appealing for different reasons, as has been shown in studies of younger and older Americans. At the same time, surveys reveal general trends about what museum members tend to value most and least in their membership benefits. For example, free/discounted entry to special events is at the top of the list; but the special and pricy magazine you send them? They’re actually not into that. (See here and here for more survey results.)

Another helpful distinction is to understand the difference between transaction-motivated members and mission-motivated members:

Transaction-motivated members are primarily motivated to join for benefits such as free admission and discounts, while mission-motivated members purchase memberships primarily for reasons related to the organization’s mission…these are the folks who say that their primary motivations for becoming a member are to “support the organization,” “support the organization’s mission,” “mission impact,” or “belong to the organization.” They also list affinity-based motivating factors ahead of more transactional motivating benefits. (“Mission-Motivated Members Find Greater Value in Their Memberships”)

To be sure, this distinction is more about identifying two ends of a spectrum than labeling two separate categories. All members are happy to help a good cause, and all members are happy to receive the benefits of membership. But when it comes to promoting membership on a website, as we will see below, a decision usually has to be made about to which motivation the museum will primarily appeal and how.

Overall, the better a museum understands its goals for membership, as well as the desires and intentions of its members, the most strategically it can think through how to best use its website for promoting membership.

Next, we will turn to some good examples of how museums are promoting membership on their websites. First, we will see how museums appeal to (potential) mission-motivated members and transaction-motivated members, as well as a third category—those who purchase gift memberships for friends and family. Then, we will look at some of the more technical aspects of how membership promotion can be incorporated into effective site design.

1) Appealing to Potential Mission-Motivated MembersOne museum that strongly emphasizes its mission in appealing to new potential members is the National Baseball Hall of Fame. By joining, one can “Be a part of something greater” by “Preserving History,” “Honoring Excellence,” and “Connecting Generations.” The membership page highlights its mission this way:

…through the Hall of Fame’s Membership Program, baseball fans from around the country and around the world can be part of the team that is preserving the Game’s history and celebrating the all-time greats.

In addition to being part of preserving baseball history, Members receive a full roster [of] benefits.

But for many, the benefits of Membership cannot be held in their hands. Their Membership brings with it the knowledge that they are part of baseball’s history.

Members are proud to help ensure that fans everywhere have a home to celebrate the history of baseball and preserve it for generations to come. Every Member is preserving history, honoring excellence and connecting generations.

The site’s homepage features a link to the membership page using similar language (see image below). For those not yet persuaded to simply support its mission, a neighboring link informs visitors that members can receive free shipping and 10% discounts on all merchandise.

Many other museums use similar mission-driven language to appeal to potential members:

“The membership program supports our mission and helps sustain this sacred site of remembrance and reflection.” (9/11 Memorial and Museum)

“Take a moment to reflect on your personal connection to World War II. Maybe your father or grandfather served in the Pacific or fought across the plains of Europe. Or perhaps your mother or grandmother supported the war effort by powering the “arsenal of democracy” here at home. Whatever their involvement, it deserves permanent recognition on the Honor Roll at America’s national WWII Museum. Become a member today and ensure that your family’s legacy is never forgotten.” (National WWII Museum)

“Your support helps us further scientific research and exploration.” (Field Museum)

“The Brooklyn Museum is one of the world’s most welcoming and contemporary encyclopedic museums and is every bit Brooklyn: creative, relevant, diverse, and trailblazing. When you join as a Member, you celebrate the great art, big ideas, and courageous conversations that can only be found here.” (Brooklyn Museum)

“Members are part of something incredible. Your support helps us are for and grow our national collection, share the benefits of creativity, and champion the right to art for everyone” (Tate)

Similar language might be found on a typical donation page, laying out the good work an institution is doing. But promoting membership instead of a simple donation provides two additional benefits. First, a member (as opposed to a simple donor) gets to feel a greater connection to the organization of which he or she is now a part. As the Art Institute of Chicago highlights on their homepage, becoming a member is synonymous with becoming part of a community:

And second, membership offers tangible benefits, many of which range from being somewhat important for mission-motivated members to crucial for transaction-motivated members.

2) Appealing to Potential Transaction-Motivated MembersIf the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s messaging sits on one side of the mission-motivated vs. transaction-motivated spectrum, the messaging on the website of the Minneapolis Institute of Art sits on the other. Their membership page announces:

Membership is all about you—your benefits, your activities, your interests. Use the benefits that work for you!

Many sites use transaction-motivated language on their homepage to encourage visitors to click to see the benefits of membership:

American Museum of Natural History

Tate

British Museum

Ultimately, the question is not whether to appeal to potential mission-motived members or to potential transaction-motivated members, but how to appeal to both groups, understanding that there will be a strong overlap. Many websites emphasize both at once. As the Whitney Museum succinctly puts it:

Members play a crucial role in helping care for the Whitney. In appreciation, Members enjoy these benefits…

The California Science Center emphasizes both this way:

Join us in our mission to stimulate curiosity and inspire science learning in everyone by creating fun, memorable experiences, because we value science as an indispensable tool for understanding our world, accessibility and inclusiveness, and enriching people’s lives. (Give & Join)

As a Member of the California Science Center Foundation, you will support a dynamic educational resource for you, your family and the community. In appreciation for your generous support, Members enjoy a year of exciting benefits and Members-only experiences. (Membership)

And the Guggenheim features this image and blurb on their homepage:

Guggenheim

3) Appealing to Gift-GiversFinally, museum memberships make appealing gifts for friends and family. In November and December, it is common to see homepages promoting membership as a great gift idea. Here’s a few examples:

American Museum of Natural History

Houston Museum of Natural Science

Museum of Modern Art

Museum of Science

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Children’s Museum of Indianapolis

The North Carolina Museum of Art highlights the way gift memberships serve multiple purposes by benefiting the museum, the recipient, and even the giver:

Gifting a Museum membership is truly the gift that gives back. It is a great way to support the NCMA while also sharing your love of art with someone who matters to you. Membership gifts make a clear statement about what you feel is important—creating community through cultural experiences. Share the NCMA with those meaningful to you, and tell them why “membership matters.” (NCMA- Members)

In sum, recognizing the three primarily motives for purchasing memberships— (1) to support the museum’s mission, (2) as a transaction to gain benefits, and (3) for gift-giving—and seeing how they overlap can help museums strategize about how to most effectively market museum memberships.

Next, we turn to optimal ways to incorporate membership promotion into a museum’s website design.

Design StrategiesHomepage & MenuFor visitors coming to the website already intending to purchase a membership, a clear link on the homepage is obviously needed. Locating a “Membership” or “Become a Member” link at the top of the page or as a sub-link under a main link like “Support” makes the page easy to find.

Some sites highlight membership with additional methods. The American Museum of Natural History features a pop-up at the top of the homepage advertising membership (when closed, it does not come up again on the same visit):

The Tate features a special button in the top right of the page:

Further down the homepage, many museums highlight the value of membership and feature links to the membership page:

The Met

Minneapolis Institute of Art

California Science Center

Membership and Ticket SalesWhen membership offers free or reduced prices for ticket sales, notifying and reminding visitors about membership benefits in the context of ticket purchases is an ideal method of promoting membership. (I speak from firsthand experience, having purchased a museum membership in this manner before!) This may take the form of a simple link, or a longer explanation:

The Henry Ford Museum

Natural History Museum

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Houston Museum of Natural Science

Visualizing BenefitsFinally, displaying membership benefits in an easy to understand and attractive way—especially when there are many levels of membership with different options that might require a lot of text—helps purchasing membership an easier and more appealing experience. Here are some examples:

Cleveland Museum of Art

Minneapolis Institute of Art

The National Gallery

Midway Museum

National Baseball Hall of Fame

Other methods of organizing membership options include the use of tabs, a horizontal scrolling gallery, and toggle menus.

Is Your Website Attracting New Museum Members?

Whether it is time to initially implement an online membership or to re-evaluate an old one, having survey the examples we have considered in this article, a next step is to think through the following questions:

How can we use our website to offer potential members the opportunity to support our mission in a way visitors find fulfilling and meaningful?
How can we use our website to offer potential members the kinds of personal benefits that they feel are worth the price of membership?
How can we use our website to encourage the purchase of gift memberships?
How are our homepage, links menu, and ticket pages designed in such a way that users are reminded and encouraged to consider purchasing membership?
How are the benefits of membership organized in a way that is visually appealing and easy to navigate?

As we noted at the beginning, countless people are already members of gyms, Costco, and Spotify. With the right strategies and a well-designed website, museums can encourage more and more people to add one more to that list: museum member.

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Museums are chock full of stories. Every object in your collection is there for a reason. There is so much more to tell than can possibly fit on a wall placard. While space on gallery walls is limited, your digital platform has no such limitations. The only limits to telling digital stories are the time …

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Museum websites are chock full of content. Not only do they offer standard business information such as location, contact, and hours of operation, but they also include collections, exhibit and exhibition pages, events, educational content, and often robust blogs with serialized stories, news, and other features.

Organizing all this content into an intuitive menu system is a challenge in its own right. (We wrote about this in our article Anatomy of Museum Information Architecture.) But establishing a set of clear top level menu terms and well-organized and intuitive submeus is just one facet of an effective museum navigation system. Once all your pages are categorized, sorted out, and stacked in a menu, there is an entirely different dimension to consider—the relative weight and priority of pages under any particular heading.

Most website menus offer dropdown selections from each main menu header. But using a mega menu allows you to more robustly emphasize, organize, and prioritize content. Instead of simply listing subpages, a mega menu allows you to group and display subpages in ways that reflect their relative importance.

A well designed mega menu offers viewers an opportunity to survey the breadth of your content before they begin to click and explore your pages. Mega menus provide context to submenus, calling out featured content from more utilitarian links. They can include images, they can be broken into sections, and even display dynamic content such as upcoming exhibitions, and featured posts and featured events.

Since museums have such a wide array of content, of various kinds, they are a prime candidate for the use of mega menus.

Examples of Museum Mega Menus Denver Institute of Nature and Science One excellent example can be seen on the Denver Institute of Nature and Science website. As you hover over their main menu, each section drops a multi-column mega menu. The first column of each contains a simple list of links similar to any drop down menu. But then additional columns are used to call out important information, giving emphasis to prioritized items. For example, their Visit menu uses the second column, highlighted in blue, to provide basic visitor information along with a “Buy Tickets” call-to-action button. The next two columns provide directions with a map, and highlight the museum’s shop.

The exhibition and events sections likewise emphasize their special exhibitions and upcoming events as well as ticket buttons.

Each menu of the Detroit Institute of Nature and Science is carefully structured to promote the most important content in each area.

Detroit Institute of the Arts The Detroit Institute of Arts also uses a mega menu to augment their drop down menus by providing the specific days and hours of operation under their Visit menu.

The Events menu provides content to their events by differentiating those that take place within the museum from those out in the community.

Expansive or Simple Museum of Science + Industry Chicago Our first example, the Denver Institute of Nature and Science, utilizes a fairly robust mega menus. But even a lighter implementation can improve the navigation experience, such as on the Museum of Science + Industry Chicago website.

The MSIC uses a simple two-column mega menu layout to provide a standard sub menu list, but also a place to call out the most important information for each section. Times and location are featured under the Visit menu, and a donation CTA under support.

WordPress Menu Plugin for Mega Menus If you are interested in adding a mega menu to a WordPress site, it’s quite possible that you could accomplish this without a complete rebuild of your site. Uber Menu is a popular and robust WordPress plugin that enables you to design and deploy mega menus for your site. Since the WordPress menu/navigation system is a discrete object in WordPress, you can build an Uber Menu and then simply replace your existing menu with the new one without a complete redesign or rebuild.

Mega menus can significantly upgrade the top level user experience of a website, and for content rich museum websites, they offer a powerful means of uncovering all the rich content, programs, and events at your museum.

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One of the guiding principles we followed, in developing the new Cuberis framework for museum websites, is a focus on Low-Code/No-Code solutions. Over the past few years WordPress-based frameworks and plugin sets have become so robust that we can now build dynamic and custom tailored websites without the need for any custom code. Our particular expertise is in crafting architectures that deploy these platforms to match the needs of museum websites. While fully deploying such a site takes quite a bit of specialized knowledge and experience, there are many tools in our toolbox that can be rolled out to incrementally improve any WordPress-based museum website, without a full redesign or rebuild of its architecture.

Maximizing Your Museums Resources Cuberis understands the challenges museums face with budgeting. The Association of Art Museum Directors puts out their biennial, Museums By the Numbers survey which consistently reports that only 25-30% of a museum’s revenue comes from earned income. The rest has to be made up from memberships, donations, major gifts, and grants. Since funding for website rebuilds are hard to come by, we’re going to be sharing DIY tips from our tool bag that you can easily deploy if your museum uses WordPress—without coding or rebuilding the entire site.

We’ll be sharing these tips, along with other insights about museum websites, through our email newsletter, so be sure to sign up!

A Prerequisite Plugin Before you implement any of the tools we’ll be recommending, you’ll definitely want to start with a solid backup system. When making changes or additions to your themes and plugins, conflicts and bugs can happen. And so you’ll always want to have an easy to use backup solution in place before installing any of the other tools that you might want to try out.

While most website hosting providers perform routine backups, having your own backup system in place, which you can control, is an important safety net when deploying new plugins. Having your own solution enables you to run an incremental backup before you make any changes. Should an error or conflict occur you will be able to quickly roll back the site.

We Recommend Updraft If you don’t already have a backup solution in place we highly recommend Updraft. Updraft has a free version that enables you to run a backup on an as needed basis, and easily restore it if you have any problems. They offer a free version which allows you to connect to any number of cloud sources for your backups (Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon, and many others). They also have their own cloud backup service starting at $70 per year. Alternatively, you can have backups sent to an email address (though many email providers will not accept large backup file attachments).

Their free version is quite robust, and will give you the safety net you need to begin experimenting with new plugs, options, and settings.

Of course Updraft also has a paid Premium version, starting at $70 per year, that offers more options such as control over the timing of scheduled backups, reporting, support and other advanced features. But for basic backups, the free version will be more than adequate.

Instant Sandbox Sites! That said, there is one feature connected with their Premium service that may be well worth the minor fee. It’s called UpdraftClone. UpdraftClone enables you to create a temporary complete duplicate version of your site on Updraft’s servers for sandbox testing. This is extremely useful if you want to test out how more advanced plugin changes, or how swapping themes might affect your site before installing them on your live production version. Creating a clone of your site can be a great way to prototype suggested upgrades and demonstrate them to decision makers.

Cloned sites are priced using “Tokens.” One clone costs one token to set for 24 hours (and one more to keep it running for a week). Tokens cost between $2-$3 each depending on how many you buy at once. But to be able to create a full clone of your entire site for just a few bucks is a tremendous value!

In the coming weeks we’ll continue to suggest some of our favorite tools and techniques that you can use to upgrade your museum’s WordPress website. If you’re not on WordPress you might want to consider a platform conversion project, which, though a bit costly, may still be affordable within a museum’s general operating budget. Once you’re on WordPress there is an ever growing set of Low Code/No Code solutions that will continuously improve the way that your website can extend the reach and impact of your museum’s collection, programs, and resources.

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Does your museum’s website allow you to nimbly adapt to changing circumstances? Can you easily spin up a digital exhibit? Are you able to cross promote events, stories, and collection objects on all of your pages? Is it a snap to update events and add new exhibitions? If the answer is no, you’re not alone. More often than not, a museum’s website is an impediment to promoting content, and cumbersome to manage.

If your website makes managing basic museum content problematic, implementing more advanced features such as online memberships with member-only content, long-form storytelling, and integrated collections may feel like a pipe dream.

Sadly, for too many museums, the riches of their collections and the deep resources of their stories are obscured by inflexible website platforms. A museum site ought to be a primary channel for extending the reach of your collections, programs, and resources rather than being an impediment.

But things are starting to change.

Dynamic, Flexible, WordPress Frameworks

Cuberis has orchestrated a range of flexible, dynamic, and cost-efficient WordPress-based platforms to provide all the content features and capabilities museums need to serve their audiences. And we’ve done it by leveraging professionally supported plugins and frameworks that require virtually no custom coding. We call this the Low-Code/No-Code revolution!

Not only does our approach maximize flexibility, by reducing the need for custom coding, these platforms are much more affordable than their custom-coded cousins. The Low-Code/No-Code approach delivers a vast array of dynamic capabilities. But what’s more, these platforms continuously roll out more and more new features, as developers compete with one another to advance their products. So when your site is driven by such platforms, its capabilities grow over time—without additional R&D investment on your part!

Last year we rolled out the first couple of museum sites built on our new flexible framework. Since then our platform has continued to expand, exceeding our initial expectations, and enabling dynamic features that used to cost tens of thousands of dollars to provide through custom coding.

Montgomery Museum of Art 2.0

The most recent example of the 2.0 version of our platform is the relaunch of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art website. We designed their previous website in 2014. Back then, there was no path to building a dynamic website other than through custom coding. Over the intervening years, there have been multiple times when the MMFA wanted to roll out new features, or changes to their architecture. Unfortunately, because their site was custom coded, even relatively small changes required one of our programmers to implement them—and thus often got put off due to prohibitive costs. This prevented the MMFA from being able to adapt in ways that they needed.

But this year, using a very modest grant, Cuberis rebuilt their site on our new platform. In a matter of weeks we were able to deploy an MVP (minimal viable project) as a new foundation for them to grow. Now the MMFA has control over all aspects of their site. And they can roll out new features at will.

I was recently chatting with Stephen Hayes, Director of Communications at the MMFA and I was able to show him a newly released calendar feature that will allow him to display related events throughout the site, wherever the context calls for it. These kinds of upgrades cost the museum nothing, but they make their site more dynamic and useful in serving their audiences.

There is much more that the MMFA would like to do with their site, and now that it’s built on our new framework, they can flexibly roll out new features as needed, without having to re-work static hand-coded templates.

Flexibility = Complexity?

While it’s true, as I explained in my previous article “Simple, Flexible, Economical, Pick Two,” that increasing a platform’s flexibility does require making some trade-offs on its simplicity, we have structured our framework to minimize complexity and ensure consistency of design by pre-building components set with global styles, and pre-structuring plugins to focus on just the needed functions each client needs. We also provide custom training videos using the newly developed website itself. That, coupled with our ongoing proactive support and assistance makes these new sites a powerfully flexible platform for the future digital initiatives of our museum clients.

Museums aren’t known for being the most nimble and fast moving of institutions. But with our new framework under the hood, they can start to respond more swiftly, and adapt more quickly to the changing needs of their constituents.

If you would like to learn more about our new framework just reach out, we’d be happy to give you a look under the hood, and demonstrate its capabilities for your museum.

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Cuberis – Museum Website Design and Development: Recent Episodes

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