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A massive thank you to everyone who replied with really helpful advice -
some of you I was able to email individually, then I got a bit overwhelmed
by the response!
These are, if you like, the highlights of the advice. There doesn't seem to
be an overall consensus of what the best solution is - that depends on the
indivdual museum/institution and their web needs. It's good to have options
though. There are also several recommended companies. Hope thi is useful to
otehr people.
Steve
Steve Gardam, Postal Heritage Trust
I am currently having a website built, that will be hosted for me by the
designer.....the website is coming in at about ?1k..and updates will cost
me round about ?60 a go........
[log in to unmask]
http://www.king-farlow.com
The St Albans Museums website is hosted by a company called Fredo, they
have always given me good service. Their servers are based in London.
Contact:
Mark Tiramani
34 Woodpecker Close
Hatfield
Herts, AL10 9ET
T:01707 265558 F: 890889
e: [log in to unmask]
I also use UK2 http://uk2.net with no problems. I also use UK2 to register
domain names but I presume you already have one. I can maintain the sites
and upload to their server without problems. Prices are competitive and
there's useful things like email redirection (i.e. you can put a mailto:
button on a web site and have it invisibly redirected to your own web
address - advantage is that should you change your own email address you
don't have to change the one that you have made public on your web site,
publicity etc.
I think you might enjoy looking at www.adaptivetechnologies.com. The
company works mainly with cultural sector clients, is used to aiding
smaller institutions, can deliver all the necessary technologies to enable
you to update your site quickly, easily and cheaply (and it is wholly owned
by a charity that's busy developing a museum in Brighton.
If you'd like to talk through the options we offer call 01273 728128 and
ask for Nick.
We have recently undergone a refit and are soon to relaunch our website.
This has been done by our local webmaker www.plexusmedia.com , who have
been excellent throughout. They have used their webstarter facility which
allows us to update and change our website
quickly and regularly - a great boon with our community led refocus.
Give them a ring on 01381 - 600818. Dave has been our contact there.
There are many students and courses which require guinea pigs for
coursework on web design etc. You might try your local college or uni. to
see if they want a organisation for
their computer science/information studies students. What you get is not
always exactly what you would want, but they have come up with some
interesting approaches for us.
Contact David Chilton at the Royal Gloucester Berks and Wiltshire Regiment
Museum, who I belive did something similar to you about a year ago. Contact
details are: 01722 419419,
[log in to unmask]
It is the wild wild west with lots of cowboys out there in hosting :-)
- how easy is to reach customer services? do they have a phone number or
just an email address? if they have a phone, ring them up and see how you
feel;
- do they say where their servers are located?
- how long have they been in business?
- a lot of technical questions about their connectivity, backups, quality
of hardware, security of facilities. It took us about a month to choose our
supplier and we passes through a few 'rough' ones.
We offer both (hosting and content management) and have provided them to a
number of museums and art related organisations.
Cristiano Bianchi
keepthinking ltd 42 Theobalds Road London WC1X 8NW
tel. +44(0)20 7404 7634
fax +44(0)20 7405 7805
mobile +44(0)7939 041169
email [log in to unmask]
web www.keepthinking.it
I have just completed a new website in Dreamweaver for an artist
www.georgedannatt.com and this is the first website I have started from
scratch, buying a domain name etc. I decided to host this with www.b-
one.net which is very competitive. My husband has moved his site to be
hosted by this company because it is so well priced. The Dannatt site cost
£33 for the purchase of the domain name, set up and hosting for the first
year. Next year it will be £9 less. So as you can see very reasonable
indeed - a .co.uk address is cheaper.
I have found with these 'hosts' it is only possible to contact them by
email and therefore it can take a day to get an answer.
I manage two private websites, both hosted by Magic Moments (part of Host
Europe) - http://www.magic-moments.com/
Each one costs about £100/year and they have a good management page that
you can use to set up e-mail addresses and forwards, as well as get site
stats. etc. I am not aware that the sites have ever disappeared off-line.
I use a free FTP software to manage file updates (SmartFTP) and this works
well on XP and Win 98 but they also provide a web page that lets you do
basic file management on the server. I find it hard to fault them if you
want something cheap and cheerful that seems so far to be excellent
quality. Plenty more info on their own website.
The simplest way by far is to write and manipulate your own website using a
package such as dreamweaver or FrontPage. The issues I have found with all
commercial hosting are lack of control (a kind of captain to engine room
scenario0, and cost ie they will all smooth talk you then hit you for £300
per change to your site.
The web packages have all become very wysiwyg. Personally I would recommend
using dreamweaver alongside an image manipulation package such as Photoshop
or fireworks, and simply using any of the hosting companies around.
We have recently undertaken a web project with a local commercial firm
called First Option. This was a result of a trial which included various
options such as internal hosting, becoming involved with a Nof project or
using an outside agency. In terms of producing a simple but effective
website the commercial company provided the best solution. You can see the
results online at... http://www.hants.gov.uk/museum/fans/index.html
The product behind it is PEACH which is fairly straightforward and you can
manage the publishing of your own data once it is up and running. We are
currently working up several other specialist collections to include on the
site. There is a link to First Option on the site so for more information
about your specific needs you would have to contact them direct.
The answer to your problem may be, instead, to invest some money in setting
up your web site so it is easier and simpler to input content and refresh
web pages. I did this with a NOF Digitise project within a Local Authority.
It takes forever to get the IT people to add updates/do changes (and they
don't want the extra work) so we set up a database which is easy for staff
to input information. Digitised pictures can be placed on the server in the
web site's folder by 1 member of staff who has authority to do that, and
then the accession number of the picture is used in the database where
appropriate. The data in the database is parsed to produce html pages.
There are also tables in the database to allow the staff to make changes to
the html templates (access to these tables is limited to those who know
what they're doing - but it is easy enough for somebody who doesn't know
much about html to change/add texts or links).
It works. We created over 7,000 pages this way. We needed the IT people to
set up the database, templates, and the parser - and if we'd had their
undivided attention, it could all have been done by one person who knew
what they were doing in 3 months or less. I had put a lot of work into the
design, layout and where/what type of navigation should be used, and had
also worked out the fields required in the main information areas of the
database (from which the metadata for individual html pages is sourced as
well as information/descriptions/captions for pictures. I had it built in
this way because I knew that after the project team left, that the database
and web site needed to be simple enough for the ordinary staff to maintain -
and most of them have only quite basic computer skills.
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