Free and Easy Website Design for Museums and Historic Sites

Book excerpt: Museums and historic sites faced with small budgets and staff can find it intimidating to redesign or create a website from scratch. Concerns over resources make coding and designing (or hiring someone to do so) daunting and expensive. It does not have to be so. Content creation is inescapable when making a website, but designing and constructing a unique website can be as simple as taking an afternoon to use a color chart to pick a color scheme and paste in text from a Word document. All of the tools discussed in the book are free at the base level, and some offer upgrade packages with even more features. The advice and techniques are all created with an eye to making websites work for smaller institutions with limited budgets and timeframes. Every museum professional has come across issues when adapting general software for an institution’s specific needs, and the information in this book will anticipate some of these needs by offering easytoimplement workarounds and information on related software or services that integrate with each website. Features include: Howto guides for Wix, Weebly, WordPress, and Google Sites Detailed comparisons of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors by cost, features, and easeofuse so that you can easily identify which platforms meet your needs Mythbusting of common website and computer assumptions Stepbystep content and design planning guide Basic HTML coding tricks and tips for the slightly more advanced users (or those who want to become so) • A free companion Web site includes links to online resources, ongoing updates to this book to keep it current, and links to other free online tools and software. Go to: https://freethemuseum.wixsite.com/aaslh to request access on this author-created and managed companion site.