If you haven’t been to the NW Carriage Museum in Raymond, you’re really missing a treasure.
Longtime beachdog.com customer and NW Carriage Museum Director Laurie Bowman asked for some help with a flier she had put together for an upcoming conference of Tour and Travel Writers. Laurie had done a great job and could have gone to print with the flier right then. Using the same text, photos, and keeping general feel of the piece, I reorganized information and added some dimension, expanding the antique feel.
What do you think?
The website recently got a complete overhaul! Museum Director Laurie and I make a great team. We did a little more volleying back-and-forth over details than is typical for a project like this, but the result has been worth it. The quality of the photos, the flow of information and, perhaps most important, the information that was culled out make the new site far superior to the one it replaced.
Putting on the perspective of the site visitor is difficult. Owners, Managers, Directors, even employees and regular volunteers, all know too much! Minds fill in the gaps making stories less complete than they should be. These same minds are prone to constructing site information that suits their needs rather than a potential visitor’s. They answer the questions they get over and over in hopes they won’t have to answer them as often. They tell what they think is most important about the business, which may not be what a potential visitor finds important at first.
But Laurie and her small but mighty team put on the hat of their museum visitor quite adeptly! They know that job one is to capture the attention and imagination of the site viewer, then to give them only the information they need as they guide them through information important to that site visitor. Culled is all the information that is interesting, but not useful to meeting the goal of the page on which it is presented. There is enough to almost sate the visitor’s appetite without filling them completely.
When you tour the site, take note of the goal of each page and how well the Museum has done at meeting those goals. It’s subtle, but it makes all the difference in the world to someone unfamiliar with their experience. Kudos, NW Carriage Museum!
