National Gallery of Art

National Gallery of Art

The National Gallery of Art is located on the mall in Washington D.C. and was established by Congress in 1937.

Intended Audience:

Tourists: Prospective visitors to Washington D.C. Art Museums;
Art lovers: who surf the internet, who work in academia, who are artists;
Museum folk

Usefulness of the Content:
Since there is a lot content on this site it is a real challenge to organize it into the an easy to use format. The "Planning a Visit" navigation link takes you to some helpful information, but it is organized into a page full of links.

Still this site is a touchstone for lectures, podcasts, virtual gallery tours, and many, many images. The content on this site seems pretty useful. However, the search function of the website is absolutely not useful. I searched three terms (Matisse, Turner, Podcast) that I was sure would get results and none actually returned search results. The content would be more useful if it were easier to search.


Consistency of Design:
The website is template based and within the content bearing pages there are a horizontal line of square images with text underneath. The web designers wisely chose to keep the background white and the font sans-serif which is easier to read on screens. I like these choices.

The overall design gives you an accurate picture of the organization which is pretty conservative in art collection terms. The NGA Kids site however is quite different, but this is intentional. The NGA kids site uses more primary colors and a black background for the pages.


Ease of Navigation:
There is a lot of content on this web site the site designers have tried to make it usable by dividing the content among 17 main links on the museum homepage. I tried out some of the links. the links to the right of the vertical rule and they were pretty useful.

Most pages require scrolling but the designers have included clickable list of contents for pages like these which limits the amount of scrolling necessary.
I think that the navigation of this site could be improved b over hauling the search function to return more results from natural language key work searching and by adding tooltips so that more information is available tot he user when he/she mouses over the navigation links.