Santa Barbara Museum of Art

www.sbmuseart.org

Target Audience:

Primarily local museum visitors, educators, families, volunteers, and donors. The site doesn’t seem to particularly target Santa Barbara’s numerous tourists (no stunning pictures of the Santa Barbara coastline or downtown, very little glamour marketing), although they must constitute a fair number of the museum’s visitors.

Usefulness of Content:

The site covers all the major information categories one would expect on a museum website, and really is quite useful, but the information is primarily presented in static, text-based form. Each current exhibition is described with a lengthy text and one accompanying photo. While this is sufficient, compared to many Web 2.0 museum sites that incorporate extensive audio-visual and interactive material, the SBMA site seems pretty dated. I was at first impressed to see that they have a page listing podcasts, but these are for past exhibits only. It’s a great idea, but connecting with their current exhibitions would invite more public interest and better museum publicity. They also need to build a link from the exhibit descriptions to the podcast listings. Furthermore, the images the podcasts describe need to be displayed, or the commentary will have little meaning to listeners.

Consistency of Design:

The museum home page is extremely unattractive, demonstrating unbalanced design, dull color choice, and underlined links. It does not fit on the screen, so one must scroll down to see the major link categories. Subpages are at least formatted to fit the screen, but they use frames to accommodate lengthy content, rather than creating series of shorter linked pages. The unconvincing presentation of the museum mission statement, which looks as if five minutes maximum were devoted to creating the page, conveys a shoddy image for a fine local institution. The museum should also change the colors on the Parents/Kids section to something other than the fluorescent pink and green with gray text.

Ease of Navigation:

In the sections where users can view descriptions of the museum’s permanent collections, they are able to view close-up images of selected items, but navigation is difficult. The site needs to add forward and back arrows to facilitate navigation through the images, rather than the confusing drop down menu bar of artist names.

After reviewing this site and that of the Huntington Library last week, it has been eye-opening to see the stark difference between cultural institution websites that have made the leap to Web 2.0 and those that haven’t kept up. Perhaps this can mainly be attributed to a lack of funding or misguided leadership vision, but the public will certainly judge these institutions to some extent by the quality of the online experience they present.