Davistown Museum Website Redesign
This is a project I recently completed for an Interactive Design class. I took a museum website that needed some remediation and gave it a fresh new look! Scroll down to see a screen cap of the original site.
This project is my first venture into the world of web design! In a course I took this summer, I was asked to choose a small museum whose website could use some sprucing up. I chose the Davistown Museum in Maine because their original site was unfocused and confusing, but there was lots of content to build from. The museum was focused on tools, through you'd barely known it after sifting through and endless sea of articles and links relating to everthing from art to nuclear fallout. I redesigned their homepage and created "Plan a Visit" and "Calendar" pages. The final mockups are featured here at the top. Scroll down to see a screenshot of the original site and more on my design process (site maps, wireframes, style tiles, etc.). Enjoy!
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This a screencap of the Davistown Museum's original homepage. A lot different, huh?
I've shared more about my process below. I really enjoyed the user experience aspects of web design. It was a nice change of pace to step away from aethetics and to focus purely on information organization and user psychology. I learned a lot about approaches to content organization that are helpful to new users and tried to apply them as best as I could to the my hypothetical client's needs.
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For my style tiles, I took two very different approaches to really try to explore very different possibilties. My first style tile was very focused on masculinity (this is a tool museum after all). I used a lot of distressed metal textures, dark grays, and rusty oranges. My second approach focused more on the historic nature of the museum. They have a lot of colonial tools, so I thought a classic, clean approach would highlight the museum's history. I used a rusty, red color to nod at the age of the tools. The second style tile ended up being the winner because it had a broader appeal rather than focusing on just one demographic. It also better matched the content on the original site which was heavily geared towards historical research.
