The Purposeful Techie

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?

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.

Giving potential donors and visitors the opportunity to contribute, buy a membership, or buy event tickets online is something that is simple to implement, if you know.  Adding an online store is not much more difficult, although it does require some extra thought.

Online payment options are something seemingly foreign to most small museums.  If you can build a website for your museum, you can add some simple payment functionality.

No matter what you do, make sure it is secure.  I’ve considered joining a professional organization relevant to my field, and apparently, they expect me to give them my credit card over a server that will not encrypt the data in any way!

Memberships and Donations

The easiest way to add secure payment options for membership or donations is to use an online payment service, such as Google Checkout or Paypal.  With either service, you can set up your button(s) with just a few clicks, and knowledge of HTML is not necessary.  Once you configure your options, either service gives you the HTML code that you can then simply paste wherever you want to see it on your website (make sure, if you’re using a WYSIWYG editor, that you paste the copied code into the code pane, and not the design pane — alternately, if you’re using a CMS like Drupal, you need to make sure you have appropriate permissions for all the HTML, and/or you may need to remove the line breaks).

The process to set either of these services is predominantly the same.  Google Checkout offers free processing for non-profits who are also part of their Google Grants (Adwords) programs. Paypal offers a discounted rate for non-profits, so be sure to give them your 501(c)3 information when you sign up.  Paypal’s rates are $0.30 per transaction, plus a percentage based on your sales volume, and compares decently with regular terminal rates. (The thing I truly hate about the per transaction fee is when people do multiple, unnecessary transactions.  Yes, you can change the quantity to 2, you don’t have to do the transaction twice!)

The nice thing about Paypal is that you can set up your account so that anyone can pay you, even without a Paypal account.  The drawback is that Paypal makes such visitors click through about 5 screens to make such a transaction.  With Google Checkout, no such functionality is possible — everyone must have an account.

Paypal

Google Checkout

Alternately, if you don’t like the look of Paypal’s button, you can attach their code to your own button image.  I don’t think this is possible with Google Checkout.  Do be sure that if your page background is anything other than white, and you’re using Google, that you choose the button with the transparent background.

One other easy option is a more full-service provider, like Network for Good’s “Custom Donate Now.”  I’m not a particularly big fan of this because small non-profits can do it themselves much cheaper.  It seems to me that if you have the cash to work with them, you have the cash to hire a web developer to implement another cheaper option for you.  I’d love to hear from anyone who disagrees.

None of these options require you to have access to your own secure server (https), yet are all secure.

For three great tips on configuring your donation page, visit Network for Good.

Event Tickets

Both Paypal and Google Checkout can be used to sell event tickets.  If you’re doing something large, however, this can get kind of messy.  Many shopping cart systems can be configured to do this,* there are many expensive ways to do this, and there are some cheap and easy ways to do this too.  Some options:

CiviCRM

Eventsbot

* I wouldn’t recommend setting up a shopping cart system just for event ticketing, but if you are already using one, give it a try!

It seems that a calendar is a must for the website of any group who has events, but how does one accomplish such a project?

If you’re coding the website yourself in HTML or some-such, a simple list of events is pretty easy. If you have a lot of events, this can get tedious pretty quickly, as you have to constantly update it. It’s also not a calendar, which some people really do prefer. Server Side Includes or javascript can be made to do the updating work, but if you are not a full-time technology person, you may not have the expertise (or time!) to mess with those.

There are a bunch of options for a more automatic calendar. Some of these are free, and some of them are paid, but not all are equally desirable. If you look at the “extras” through your web host’s cpanel or equivalent, you’ll probably find at least one calendar option. If you google “website calendar,” you’ll get a bunch more options. I’ve used a variety of different versions of these web calendars in the past, and I’ve never really liked them. They often require a separate sign-in (don’t I have enough passwords?), and almost always require separate/double work to make them look like the rest of the site. On top of all of that, they don’t tend to integrate well with other systems. This represents a workable solution for a website calendar, but is obviously not ideal.

Another option is Google/Yahoo/etc. calendar. I’m partial to Google’s calendar. The api is quite extensible, and the embed code is pretty easy to tweak (assuming you know the hex codes for the colors you use on your website, or you at least know how to find them), you can make the colors match, can customize the size, shape, and what it displays (i.e., a constantly updated list, a weekly calendar, a monthly calendar, etc.). If you are using a CMS, you might have to install an additional module to use it (as is the case with Joomla), or, if you’re using Drupal, it tends to work best in a block.

If you are using a CMS, there are, of course, a whole host of options. With Drupal, you can use some combination of Event/Calendar/Date, but I don’t really like the way that works. You can also use CiviEvent in combination with some of the above, but CiviEvent still has some restrictions on repeating events that don’t make it ideal. No separate login and no separate theming work to do.

Another option would be to add your events to someone else’s calendar, and use their api to feed that information to your website. I’ve seen options for doing this through a big local newspaper, as well as an arts marketing organization for the area. How doable this is will depend on the api, and what is powering the rest of your website.