Website relaunch

After a couple of month's work, with seasonal festivities inbetween, I am finally at a stage to relaunch our website. With all the redevelopment work going on it seemed a good opportunity to update the site. Its amazing how quickly website styles become outdated. Hopefully this one will last for a couple of years. One of the biggest changes was to include flickr to show off some of the exhibits. This has meant a great saving on time and file size as flickr do all the work for you. I used to have to do a thumbnail for each image then a separate webpage to display the full sized image which had to be scaled to fit the page size anyway. Now all I need do is upload an image to flickr and they do all the rest. It's been good getting stuck into webdesign again and learning some of the new tricks that are out there. Blogging is new to me as well but I think it will be a great asset to the Museum and the work of the Friends. There is a dearth of Scottish/UK museum websites and blogs and hopefully our efforts will encourage others to follow suit.
Now I have to just get word out to the print media about the site relaunch and the start of the blog. This will mean a wee while spent on putting a press release together. Hopefully I can encourage the local press to make comments on the blog as well. I also want to encourage youngsters to take part in the blog and the museum outreach projects. After the press releases I really need to get stuck in to transcribing some of our oral history conversations - all in all a busy day. (Chris)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Aha! Someone else using flickr. It's a great solution to the storage and delivery problem for small museums. Any particular reason for using Blogger for the blog rather than, say, Wordpress on the main museum site? Unless you're using the poxy (and frankly overpriced) 123-reg.co.uk hosting...

I didn't see the old site, but the new one looks very nice, btw.

friends@falconermuseum.co.uk said...

We went for blogger becuase it was free and we could edit the html. I agree 123-reg is expensive we do host with them (that's quite well priced) but their blogging charge of £3.99 a monthis far too high.

Anonymous said...

I've been using Hostroute.co.uk, and they've been pretty good - but I have a reseller account and several sites hosted (personal sites, friends, family, that sort of thing), so it was more cost effective - it's where Curator's Egg is hosted. But they also have a myqth.co.uk brand which would give you 3GB of disk space plus PHP and MySQL so you could run a CMS for the main site (I'd suggest Website Baker) and WordPress for the blog - gives you more control than blogger and you don't have have anybody's adverts on your page. That would set you back £30 a year for the hosting (but you can pay monthly), but there are other similar deals around. As far as I can see 123-reg doesn't offer PHP or databases, and the amount of disk space they offer ain't that great either.

But then, I am a control freak.

I realise this may sound like an advert - but I'm just a customer, and as I said there are plenty of other hosting providers out there. I do use 123-reg for domain names, but would never consider them for hosting. You could always move when the contract's up!

friends@falconermuseum.co.uk said...

I've always used 123 for domain names and it was just quick and easy to go with them. I probably will look at other services in a year its all a steep learning curve at the moment. (Chris)

Anonymous said...

"...its all a steep learning curve at the moment..."

Fun though isn't it?

"I've always used 123 for domain names"

Me too. Do you not think that the redesign of their web site made things a bit rubbish though? They just had to fix it when Pipex took over, even though it wasn't broken.