or Why It’s Better to Pretend You Don’t Know Anything About Computers.

Click over to The Oatmeal for the full series.

<Trying to decide if my boss would think it funny if I forwarded it to her.>

Awhile back, I posted about ways to create online exhibits.  There are some new entries, and I have some additional comments, so it’s time for an update.

One new option is Open Museum. Right now, curating exhibits there is free, although that should change when they reach their beta phase.  (See the business faq.)  In the meantime, this seems like a nice option, particularly for small museums without the confidence to try some of the options with more technical requirements, or for those who like the idea of having a more social aspect to online collections.  While if it became a commonly-known portal for online museum exhibits, I think that might make it more valuable.  I’m not sure what Open Museum provides right now though that is not built into Flickr.

There may be some other options available, depending on where you are.  In Arizona, for instance, there is the Arizona Memory Project, which brings some similar online exhibits options, although with some of the same drawbacks of Flickr or Open Museum (i.e., few options for configuring into a more creative exhibit).

Before I talked about Pacyderm. The new release of Pacyderm (via Pachyforge) is “slated for release in Fall 2009.”  Granted, Fall 2009 hasn’t passed yet, but there seems to be very little going on.  That could be because they’re working hard on the new release, or because not much is going on.

Both Open Exhibits and Collection Space are still pending.  Open Exhibits has released some interesting survey results.  The numbers themselves are interesting, as are some of the responses to the open-ended questions.

Larry Cebula at Northwest History has recently posted about different Collections Management software options.  There are some good contenders, and some overlap with the ability to create online exhibits (for instance, CollectiveAccess seems like it does a great job of putting collections online, although perhaps not so much as “exhbits”).

Right now, I think CollectiveAccess and Omeka are my picks for the win – assuming a museum has someone who can install (and maintain) them.  I haven’t yet tried installing CollectiveAccess, but I have installed and configured Omeka, and, at least on Dreamhost, it was super fast and easy.

Are there online exhibits options I’ve missed?

What Not to Retweet

A local children’s museum is using a service like Auto Retweet (or something similar) to automatically retweet just about everything posted to Twitter by anyone involving the words “children” and “museum.” Never mind the fact that most of these tweets are completely inane and totally irrelevant to the retweeting museum in particular (things like “I went to the [insert random children's museum here] today!”), but the situation is made worse by the fact that this came through today: “Museum was nice but too many kids and add all the stupid an rude old people who think they deserve special treatment at a children museum!”

Perhaps this is not exactly the kind of thing a children’s museum should be retweeting, but I’m willing to bet the museum doing so hasn’t even seen this.  They rarely post anything real. I’ve wound up in conversations with more than a couple local people who’ve unfollowed this museum for the random rewteeting.

End point is that I’m not sure this is a solid Twitter “strategy.” But then again, they do have more followers than the museum for which I tweet, so perhaps they’re onto something. Are there other non-profits who do this, and does it seem successful?

Other Thoughts From Around the Web

Is Auto-Tweet a Dirty Word? Interesting take on what value can come from automated tweets.

From Beth’s Blog, Best Practices for Micro Blogging in Museums (some great tips the museum referenced above might want to read).

10 Thoughts to Get You Started Using Social Media for your Non-Profit or Do-Good Project
100 Best Curator and Museum Blogs (via the Burke Museum Blog)

These all come from actual museum websites I’ve been browsing this morning:

1. Music that plays automatically.  Double-plus negative points for being horribly twangy.
2. Navigational buttons that are in flash only.  Plus 1 for having text links of the same at the bottom, minus 1 for not repeating them on subsequent pages, minus 1 for the flash not doing anything cool (why bother?).
3. Having a nice design, but no content.  Seriously, not even a location.
4. Using a difficult to read font.  (Incidentally, has anyone ever noticed that a lot of history museum websites use the same font?) 
5. Using a speckled background.  Am I the only one that finds text difficult to read on such a background?
6. Asking for credit card information on a non-secure page.
7. Using pdfs where actual webpages would be best.
8. Having a badly designed/malfunctioning website, and including promo information for the company/individual who did it.
9. Using frames without a solid reason (I can’t think of what that reason could be, but I’m willing to keep an open mind).
10. Inconsistent navigation.  See #2, but it isn’t that hard to repeat your navigational element on all pages of the site.  And I do mean all.
11. Not creating a 301 redirect for a frequently-accessed page whose link has changed (yet Google still includes the old page on the site links).  If you’d go to the trouble of updating your sitemap, Google could significantly reduce the number of people trying to access the old page.
12. Linking to a page whose title is an acronym (for heaven knows what), and then simply saying “Page under construction” once we get there.  Couldn’t you at least tell me what the acronym stands for?
13. Having a newsletters page, and the most recent one is from 2006.  Are you still in existence?  What happened?  Do you not have a newsletter anymore?
14. Having a site/hit counter.  This, even more than the frames, is so 1997.  If you want to know how many visits you’re getting (and you should), there are lots of ways to do that, and none of them involve a hit counter on your front page.

Now, all of these things are easy to fix.  If whoever did the webpage in the first place was capable enough to cause one of the above problems, they can also fix it!  (And doing so is my sincere recommendation.)

If in doubt, here are two resources to help:

Web Site Usability Checklist

MIT Usability Guidelines

Photo credit, mafic

One easy way to build an online store simply uses Paypal or Google Checkout, and a table you create yourself with all of your merchandise.

This method, of course, is not much fun.  It’s labor intensive, and you do have to be well versed in HTML to make it happen (or else cozy with your editor).  It’s also not very search engine friendly.

The good news is that there are easier ways that won’t break the bank.

Questions to Answer First?

Before we get to how, we have to tackle a number of other questions.  Presumably, your museum already has an actual shop at the museum, which can help you get started.

What do you sell at your actual store?  Books?  Shirts with your logos?  Rocks?  Old fashioned toys?

Which items are your best-selling?

What will you do about shipping? (Shipping gets expensive, very quickly.  Have you ever tried to mail something you paid 50 cents for?  Unless it fits in a regular envelope, you’ll likely pay more to ship it than you did for the purchase.)  (Note that some shopping carts will figure shipping automatically for you, or you can set your own rates based on whatever you want — with this method, you undoubtedly vacillate between coming out ahead or behind on any given order.  If you’ve picked an appropriate rate, you should come out about even over the course of the year.)

Who is going to process orders?

This part gets tricky

If your best selling item in the store costs less than $10, or is available for less money on Amazon, you may need to rethink the online store.  No one wants to pay $6 in shipping for something they paid $2 for, and if your primary stock consists of books that are readily available elsewhere, don’t count on many sales.

If, however, you have something unique (books printed by your museum/society, or locally handmade Indian jewelry, perhaps), it might be worth the time and effort to create an online store.

Requirements

To begin with, there are some musts for your store website, regardless of how you accomplish them:

• Restricted information must be passed through a secure, encrypted server (ssl — through the https: prefix, you’ll see the lock in your browser if this is the case)
• No login specific to your site should be required (login to the payment processor, if common (i.e., Google Checkout or Paypal in the U.S.), is okay)
• Don’t require information you don’t need (studies have shown that this will decrease your conversion rate)
• Buyers should be able to complete the sale in a minimum number of clicks (make “buy now” types of of buttons easy to find)
• Provide a list of Frequently Asked Questions, and your contact information (including phone number, email, and physical/mailing address)

How To

Options for building your online store include manually with HTML, manually using a database (although I really don’t recommend it — this may be a good way to learn a bit about PHP and MySQL, but it’s not going to be your best option), or through a shopping cart builder software. 

Your web host probably has a number of easy to install options for creating a store, either directly from your cpanel, or from something like Simple Scripts or Fantastico (if you are lucky enough to have the choice, use Simple Scripts!).

Simple Scripts

If you are considering a specific cart, check around the web for reviews, tutorials, and demos before you actually get started.  There are a lot to choose from, and many are either open source, or included with your web hosting.  If you do decide to use a shopping cart that you must first purchase, be sure you know what you’re purchasing, and why.

If you are already using Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, or practically any other common CMS, there’s a good chance there is a shopping cart module.  For Drupal, I’ve played with Drupal e-Commerce and Ubercart, and greatly prefer Ubercart.  Joomla seems to have more options than I’d care to count, and WordPress has quite a few as well, including WP E-Commerce.

The wonderful thing about using a shopping cart is that the whole process becomes very intuitive.  You click here to upload a photo, type in a description and price, set limits and shipping as appropriate, and you’re done!  You are responsible for the content, but not the coding.  It also makes it very simple to make updates.

Most carts integrate well with a variety of payment processors, so configuring the payment part of the cart is likely to require a little bit of set up when you first build the store, and then you can pretty much forget about it (whereas if you’re building from scratch in HTML, you’ll be spending a lot of time logged in to Paypal building buttons).

Testing!

One important final thing to remember is to check your site in mulitple browsers – both to see how it looks, and how it acts.  Microsoft has anti-phishing capabilities built in to Internet Explorer, and I once found out one of my sites was producing a message telling visitors using IE (and paying attention) that it could be a phishing site.  I had to correct Microsoft on this a couple of times, so make sure you periodically check this.