The Glessner House, built in 1887 and located on Prairie Avenue, is an “internationally known architectural treasure” here in Chicago. Today it serves as a museum and a place to interpret art, architecture and social history. The museum is an interesting place, and seems to have a lot to offer. Unfortunately, the website for the museum is almost as dated as the house itself (ok, I exaggerate just a little). Planted firmly in the realm of Web 1.0, the site is a slew of text and bright gold backdrop.
Enter Public History New Media class. This week we were split into teams and given the challenge of revamping the website for the Glessner House Museum. The rules were few; just simply that we must redesign the site to make it more accessible, user-friendly, and visually appealing using one of the free site-builder platforms that can be found online. Sounds easy enough, right? After all, we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel (and by that I mean we weren’t to create new content, just copy and paste). We just had to change the way it looked.
Group projects are interesting animals. They often take on a life of their own, and always present an array of hurdles and opportunities. This one was no exception. Let me just run down a brief list of some of the hurdles and opportunities I ran into during this process.
Hurdle #1: Right out of the starting gate I was met with a challenge, albeit a rather small one. My group and I decided to build our site on Wix, a site that was brand-spanking new to all but one of us. And I was not the one. At first it was a bit daunting. The site allows for quite a bit of freedom and creativity. It even has an interface that allows you to edit the way your site will look on a mobile device, independent of the one people will see when they access it from a computer. Thankfully, however, when it was all said and done it only took a couple minutes of poking around for me to grasp a good working knowledge of the tools Wix has to offer. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but it’s not so steep as it is for other platforms I’ve used.
Opportunity #1: Collaboration!! The single most beneficial aspect of group work (at least in my humble opinion) is the opportunity it presents for different minds to come together and pool their assets. Every person in the group offers a different perspective, a different way of looking at things. I’ll admit that sometimes this can go horribly array; but when done correctly, the opportunities are endless! This group project was no exception. For this assignment I deemed it a blessing to be working in groups. It relied heavily on aesthetics and creativity, neither of which I am very well-versed in. Because I was working with other people, I was able to feed off of their ideas and fill in any weaknesses I might have in the “make it look pretty” department. In the end, we produced a pretty fetching website, if I do say so myself.
Hurdle #2: Consistency. When you have multiple people with their hands in the pot it can be difficult to keep things consistent. This can be a problem when you’re dealing with a website. Consistency across pages helps orient users. It is harder for them to feel lost or confused if fonts, color schemes, and lay outs stay relatively the same on every page of the site. This can be tricky when working in a group. For instance, with our website I tried to make sure that all of the page headings where the same size, font, and in the same place across the entire site. Easier said than done. I’m still not 100% convinced that I was successful, but I definitely gave it the good ol’ college try and I got it pretty darn close.
Opportunity #2: Usually, finding a time and place to meet is the bane of my existence when it comes to group work. Between classes, work, internships, other homework, and having to accommodate commutes it’s nearly impossible…Not to mention we were working on this over Spring Break. This particular assignment, however, completely did away with that issue. Because it was entirely online, we merely had to create one account and make sure all four of us had the login information. Then we could sign in, do our business, and sign out without our paths ever crossing. Not that I don’t love the ladies in my group, but the nature of this project was a Godsend. All hail Web 2.0!
There’s one more thing I’d like to note about this project. It reminded me just how much time and effort actually goes into building these sites. I think often we take for granted that something like this is “free;” that we can open up our web browsers and surf thousands of pages in mere minutes. Sure, we didn’t have to pay a fee to get our site up and running; but we did spend a good amount of our valuable time working on it. Â And we didn’t even have to produce any new content! My hat’s off to those whose entire job is to build these things…usually from scratch.
Old Soul New Media 
Some really nice reflections here. On the consistency point, did your group divide the project into specific aspects of the site (images, text, styling) or by page? The latter appears to have been more common in the class, but I wonder if it is necessarily the only (or best) way to go with a project like this? I like that you enjoyed the freedom of working on your own schedule, but were there any drawbacks to working so independently? Perhaps going back to the earlier point about consistency? Or is it alleviated by the way in which themes and the limits place by the platforms we use provide useful parameters?