1990s homepage - love the grey!

Following my session with Digital Heritage students a while back, a number of colleagues have shown an interest in the history of the Museum’s website. So, just for them, and anyone else interested, here is a summary.

The museum’s first website appeared in the early 1990s, taking advantage of the services available within the University. The homepage was a pretty drab grey (very corporate) and was simply a splashpage. In fact you needed to go through a subsequent ‘homepage’ before you got anywhere near content!  Added to this, the limited number of images available made it a very peculiar form of ‘brochureware’. If you had the knowledge of the museum’s structure and organisation you might be lucky to find some content. This said – we are talking about prehistory here. Much of this site was handwritten in HTML and it was the time when you could sit there for an hour waiting for an image to appear (line by line by line!).  

Looking at the homepage, the staff list, gallery descriptions and other content it is possible to map the development of the website to the development of the museum as a modern museum serving the needs of its multiplicity of users rather than limiting it to those with the appropriate academic background.

Enjoy the past!

1999 homepage - full colour!

2003 homepage

2004 homepage - such clutter!

So, what was it we discussed? Taking the Manchester Museum as a case study we looked at how the museum’s website has developed over the last fifteen years.  The first website (or at least the first archived one) was pretty much brochureware requiring knowledge of the organisation and its terminology (plus two splash screens before you could even get to any content.  You can also look at changes in staff structure and philosophy and approach of the museum to its collection and users and mirror these changes from an inward-facing organisation to one which is attempting to engage a wide range of users and visitors.  

Moving from this we looked at current developments in our web activiries and strategy, including Faceboook, blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter.  Moving beyond Manchester there’s some pretty good interesting stuff going on, especially in Australia and New Zealand – much more of this stuff later!