Warbird Information Exchange

We are looking at updating the whole Grissom Air Museum website. Starting all over from scratch. So I would love to hear your opinions. We all have spent a great deal of time I am sure on museum websites. Please sound off her on your likes and dislikes. Thank you guys so much.

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Chris Henry
EAA Aviation Museum Manager

1. Pictures of each plane on exhibit and a little information on the planes history

2. If doing a renovation on a plane in the museum, update the progress with pictures.

3. A link to a good map website, preferably one that you can go from a road map view to a aerial picture view.

4. And of course the basics: Hours of Operation, Prices, Calendar of Special Events

I think using the blog format is a better way. Offering constant content is the only way a small museum can be heard.
Educate your visitor on how to donate , time, money or artifacts.
Media Rich! Video, slide shows it doesn't cost that much to get rich content.
Getting paper archives online are another no brainer. Thats the next step on my end.

@scfan I have been working on a new version of a website for the CASC to try and show those exact features.
I have been working on a demo / beta version http://cascstratford.wordpress.com/ (there are some vacant pages)


Just my 2 cents

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Andrew King
Air Museum Director with no Museum to Direct
Open to Suggestions

I hate anything with frames of flash- and especially sound which means everyone at work will know I'm surfing during working hours (only on my breaks though!).

I'll tell you one pet peeve I have with websites that use sound. Usually when on the computer the average user (me anyway tends to surf without paying much attention to sound. Some websites use sound with no warning and programmed extremely loud. You open a page on these sites and you are hit with a sudden and extremely loud blast of either voice or music.
I'll tell you the truth, some of these sites could easily give an older person a heart attack )))))))))
Anyway, my suggestion would be that if sound is an option for your site, that you temper it back a bit to avoid that "shock" letting it build up gently instead of coming on like gang busters
Dudley Henriques

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Dudley Henriques
International Fighter Pilots Fellowship

i agree. plus some site's navigation is out of wrongway corrigan's compass. google something, & be lost to the info abyss. there is almost to much info out their to cull through & much of it is redundant.

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tom d. friedman - hey!!! those fokkers were messerschmitts!! * without ammunition, the usaf would be just another flying club!!! * better to have piece of mind than piece of tail!!

I agree with BDK. I absolutely despise flash and think it should be banned as a format from the internet. Whenever I visit a website and flash content starts loading, I immediately leave the website - no matter what!

Other than that, all of the other stuff everybody said. I do particularly like the history of particular airframes at the museum and a current picture. I think it's so annoying when aviation museums put a "generic" picture of the type of aircraft they are writing about. To me, it just screams lazyness from the viewpoint of the website builder. It also looks cheap.

We are thinking no music or sounds on the website unless you click a link to a video update on one of the restorations. How about links to the museum's facebook page and to the gift shop?

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Chris Henry
EAA Aviation Museum Manager

Sounds like a great idea; obvious for the gift shop and Facebook is getting to be THE place for everyday communication in the active warbird family. I must have at least 100 contacts, mostly pilots and crew who frequent Facebook. Someone just mentioned to me today that the membership on FB is up in the millions at this point.
DH

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Dudley Henriques
International Fighter Pilots Fellowship

Facebook really is the place anymore. I developed and am continuing to build up the Facebook page for the museum. Here is a link. Please feel free to join.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Grisso ... 2473733391

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Chris Henry
EAA Aviation Museum Manager

Mostly good points so far.

I would add to the individual aircraft pages: history of the aircraft being represented, AND history of the particular airframe. Keep the generic aircraft type history brief.

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Sure, Charles Lindbergh flew the plane... but Tom Rutledge built the engine!

Visit Django Studios online or Facebook!

By the way, thanks for asking this question. I think that website developers sometime look for all the fancy bells and whistles to show how familiar they are with the latest programming techniques, but that makes a site akin to an extreme video game. they miss the point that people searching a museum website are typically looking for information and education rather than fast paced entertainment.

My biggest complaint about frames is that no matter how big of a screen I have, frames cut down on the viewing area of what I am actually reading. I often get the properties of the page and just view the page by itself which is a waste of my time. As others have indicated, if you waste too much of a viewer's time they won't be back!

Dislike frames, and also am OK with Flash iiiiifff used appropriately. Please no automatically launched sound. It's not a matter of work, or even not wanting someone to hear, I just loath and despise it.

Ryan

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Aerial Photographer with Red Wing Aerial Photography currently based at KRBD and tailwheel CFI.
Websites: Texas Tailwheel Flight Training, DoolittleRaid.com and Lbirds.com.

The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the LORD. - Prov. 21:31 - Train, Practice, Trust.

Hours, times, contact details, location. These are essential, what 90% of your visitors will NEED it for, and not just 'nice to have'. Make 'em easy to find and clear to understand.

No sound. (links to videos etc marked as such, fine.)

No flash.

Ensure it's compatible with as many browsers / platforms etc. as possible. I'm on a Mac, using Firefox, and even if I could use IE (or had a PC) I wouldn't.

Ensure images are good enough quality - watch for pixilisation.

Don't do cheap nasty aeroplanes flying over the site, or turning props or fluttering flags etc, etc. Ten your olds aren't hooked by moving stuff anymore and 40 year olds like me see it is childish junk.

Stuff like Facebook, Twitter etc are great, but don't put content there you can't get on the website - they are another 'route to market' not an alternative. I won't touch Facebook again, for good reasons, and I'm not alone. (Others find it fine, of course, and as has been said, for many it works well.)

No 'mystery meat'.

Do a blog or Facebook/Twitter stuff only if you can keep it up. "New for 2006" or "Ron will be finishing this wing in the summer of 2008" just looks bad. Make a commitment (quarterly, not weekly say) that you can commit to and stick to it.

Make sure that internal stuff is acted on and goes up fast. If you lose the support of the membership / those 'inside' then what are they going to tell the public? Who in the organisation 'owns' the website? Can they make changes immediately? If not, make it so.

The biggest web-mistake is NOT doing the following...
When you are at Beta, get a bunch of guys who've never seen anything of your website to do test runs/workshops with it. Observe, without intervening and note the 101+ things where it doesn't work like you thought it would, and note it down. Make your web-monkeys fix those, and just mallet their fingers or pull their ponytails if they a) try to blame the users b) try to explain away why they half-@ssed system doesn't work from the user point of view. It's about making the customers / users happy, not an easy, flashy life for the webboes.

And, when tempted, remember: Keep It Simple, Stupid!

Regards,

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James K

"Switch on the underwater landing lights"
Emilio Largo, Thunderball.

www.VintageAeroWriter.com

I agree with most of the points here. I like a site that loads quickly and provides information and good, clear graphics.

Too many times web designers get carried away with showing off that they are able to use all manner of fancy add-ons to a site, and instead of making the site look better, it detracts from it. It's supposed to be about the organization that is being spot-lighted, not the web designer at all.

If blogs or FB are included, they should be links off the main navigation page, not the main basis of the site.

In learning how to make my own website for my biz, I found a statistic that said most people will navigate away from a page if it takes more than 3 or 4 seconds to load completely. In watching my own page counters as I changed and updated things over the years, I would agree with this. I know that I leave any page that isn't loaded in 5 seconds....unless it is the only thing on the subject available and I am forced to wait.

Like someone else said, "Keep It Simple Stupid"!