As you’ve no doubt noticed, things are looking a bit different around here. Built from the ground up in WordPress, under a new domain name, and with loads of new features, we’re excited to unveil our brand new website.
Coming out of last summer’s DHPSNY grant-funded strategic planning retreat with BoardStrong advisor Barbara Paxton, it was clear to the board that the next major project was going to have to be upgrading our website. It was a bit of a ticking time-bomb, really. The old site was barely hanging on, with an outdated WordPress theme, clunky page layouts, years of tacked-on plugins, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to update the website internally.
When we first sat down to develop a vision for the new website, aligned with our strategic planning and supporting our revised mission statement, what we arrived at was quite simple:
- Put patrons first: Potential patrons to the Richardson-Bates House Museum are most likely to interact with us through our website first…and the old site did not put our best foot forward. To that end, patrons should be able to quickly find information about admission, upcoming events, and (eventually) be able to purchase timed-entry tickets on a website that looks like it belongs to a historical organization.
- Donate or get involved, quickly and easily: The Society and museum are nothing without our vibrant members, generous donors, and unforgettable volunteers. Those interested in getting involved ought to be able to quickly donate, become a member, or find volunteering and internship opportunities.
- Explore the Society’s collections online: In recent years, the Society has made tremendous strides in digitizing our most popular collections and making them available to the public through our New York Heritage repository. But our previous site did not have a good way to direct researchers there, nor did it allow us to generate curated highlights of the most important pieces in our collection. This needed correcting.
- Learn more about Oswego County history, right from the source: Though our previous site featured educational material, its primary audience was educators and the materials themselves were cumbersome. Plus, it barely scratched the surface of the rich tapestry of Oswego County history, and we yearned for a more streamlined way to update our educational material internally. Treating our educational offerings as something closer to a blog felt like the best solution for the scale of the work.
But as it turns out, it’s incredibly easy to say you need a new website… and much harder to figure out what you need and then even harder to actually build the thing!
I snapped this photo during our very last Google Meet session, where we proofread every single page before telling Steve Vicario the site was ready to go live. We did our best work in these little video boxes! (not pictured is our incredible board president, Mary Kay Stone, who was attending a MANY Conference in Albany during our final meeting.)
Beginning in September 2023, our small volunteer subcommittee embarked on a project to rebuild the website with the above goals in mind… and let me tell you, this was no small ask. I helmed the work from a creative director role, while board president Mary Kay Stone, staff member Evie Frederiksen, and volunteer Diana Dean all did an incredible combination of thinking through taxonomies, helping nail down site architecture, sourcing material, writing new content, proofreading, and learning the WordPress Gutenberg editor to construct pages themselves. Oh, and all this was happening while, on the technical side, we were switching web hosts to Steve Vicario and Team V Technology, who also helped get our staging site set up to even develop the new site in the first place!
I think the changes are immediately obvious to anybody familiar with the old website—large imagery, carousels, sliders, dynamic elements, animated buttons and high-quality fonts make all the difference…
We scoped an ambitious deadline for the launch of the new site, wanting it ready for our 2024 season opening. This meant having to decide as a team what to prioritize and what can come later. We met on a biweekly basis, and then a weekly one, over the coming months via Google Meet. Those meetings were a mish-mash of page design, discussion, thought-starters, mayhem and more…and a lot of great revelations came from that regular meeting cadence. Sadly, some of these ideas are currently sitting in drafts or are on the back burner for now. Our teamwork in getting everything ready for launch is something I’m quite proud of, and I’m in awe of everyone’s hard work, dedication, and insight. All those extra ideas we deemed non-essential for launch will undoubtedly find their way to the website soon.
The end result of all of this hard work—if we did our jobs right—is that all of the above goals have been actualized, and you can plan your visit, donate to support us, explore our collections, or learn about Oswego County history with just a couple mouse-clicks or finger-taps.
From a design perspective, I think the changes are immediately obvious to anybody familiar with the old website—large imagery, carousels, sliders, dynamic elements, animated buttons and high-quality fonts make all the difference in bringing our old pages back to life while still retaining a strong historic feel. A key aspect of the design was ensuring it aligned with our other branding initiatives happening at the museum, like our overhauled member newsletter, which features large imagery and plenty of little design flourishes throughout. A fresh color palette of golds, blues and teals are reflective of the décor of the museum’s downstairs period rooms and are now used in both our print and digital media. And I can finally show off the redesigned Oswego County Historical Society logo in all it’s high-resolution glory. We purchased a WordPress theme (Ozeum by ThemeRex, to be precise) and I was able to modify it as I needed to; the benefit of starting from a theme, also, means that adapting pages across different screen sizes was something I didn’t have to sweat over, as the theme did those conversions for us.
A note about the domain name…
You’ll notice that our domain name is now oswegohistorical.org, and is no longer rbhousemuseum.org. Don’t worry, if you’ve previously bookmarked the old URL, you’ll be redirected to the new one automatically. The reason for this change, in retrospect, is obvious: the Oswego County Historical Society, though we may be headquartered in the Richardson-Bates House Museum, is becoming so much more than just our Italian villa. We thought it best to reflect this distinction between the museum and institution by changing how we refer to ourselves in the digital realm. It’s a small shift, but has a strong impact in how we present the Society moving forward, both internally and externally. Hopefully, the new URL is a bit easier to remember now, too.
Oswego County Historical Society relies heavily on Google Drive to store and manage our internal operational files. Our committee had a dedicated, shared Website folder that included a project tracker, all the new writing, assets for the website, and anything else you could think of. Staying organized was key to keeping pace with our ambitious deadline!
Now, there are bound to be bugs, broken links, messed-up pages and all sorts of mishaps. If you run into anything like that, please take a screenshot or jot down the issue and contact us to let us know about it. Understand that the site will continue to be a work in progress, with sections like Education and Collections being updated on an ongoing basis. Also in the coming months, look forward to new features, like online membership payments and a gift shop, as soon as we can get them working.
With our refreshed site, we’re one step closer to being the premier resource for all things Oswego County history—past, present, and future. We hope you’ll stick around for the ride. Thank you for your continued support of Oswego County Historical Society and the Richardson-Bates House Museum!
