Posted 8 months ago Comments
A tremendous number of people have become reliant upon searching the Internet for finding out information about things. Not having a website for your museum is absolutely costing you money. If you don’t currently have a website for the museum it may be because you don’t have anyone employed who knows anything about technology. Perhaps you feel that having a website is unnecessary for your museum because it is so small or hobby oriented, or because you just can’t imagine people wanting to visit a website instead of coming to your location.
I can’t stress enough how important it really is to have a website. Even if it’s a very simple one, you need to set up a website and maintain it over time. We live in a digital age now, and many of the newer generations of people have become dependent on it. Even if your museum is in a remote location, I would be willing to bet that you have received phone calls, visitors, or emails asking if you have a website.
A few reasons that people want to visit your museum’s website:
1. Consumers want to quickly look up where you are located, what your hours are, and how much it costs to visit
2. Consumers want to learn about what your museum is and what kind of exhibits you have
3. Consumers want to see pictures of your exhibits
4. Consumers want to read about upcoming events or other important museum news
It is understandable that you may not have a budget to build a website, and you may be intimidated by the process after speaking to a website consultant. If you have no website at all you might consider learning how to build one. A poorly designed but functional website is better than not having one at all.
There are many tools and services available to make websites. While learning how to build a website is outside the scope of this article, you can use tools like Microsoft Word and Apple Pages to construct a website even if you have no technology skills at all. These word processing applications will not create a correct or even very well designed website, but it will at least let you put up the basic information necessary to appease your potential visitors.
You may think that websites are only needed for larger museums, or museums that center around technology, but that is not true. All museums need a website.
This article is part of a series titled Improving Your Museum’s Marketing Efforts. To learn more about the series and to read the other articles, visit the series introduction article.
