Online Database Support

Hello All,

While not necessarily a Mac or Apple specific question, I’m hoping I can pick the brains of all the smart people in here. I am a tech advisor for a local museum. One of the museum’s functions is maintaining a Hall of Fame directory for the paper industry. Our current website is a Wordpress site where we have all the existing members of the HOF and you can sort by year inducted, last name, company they were associated with, etc. This instance of the site is too complicated for the staff to understand and we want to update it to something nicer. The page I’m referring to can be found here.

My question is if anybody has done something similar with a website? Any ideas on how to implement this on a template based system like Squarespace or equivalent? I’m open to ideas, and the simpler the management and future inductee addition to the site, the better.

Thanks in advance!

1 Like

What is meant by “too complicated” and “nicer”? Are the changes that are needed to mitigate the issues and make a “nicer” site not possible to implement in Wordpress?

By example, I see six different categories of content in a table of contents on the left (history and mission, announcements, database content, …). Three of them lead to step-wise (offset) scrolling in the right frame. The other three links each open their own page (totally destroying the ToC). Why are the main table of contents links causing different types of actions. Why are they each not causing the page to scroll or (my preferred) each causing a new frame to appear while maintaining the table of contents on the left? These would be my specific reports to why the page is “too complicated” or “not nice”.

If this type of issue is part of what is meant by “too complicated”, can the required changes be implemented in Wordpress or not?


JJW

Yes I would echo @DrJJWMac, it’s tempting to always want to wholesale replace systems, however the more practical solution many times is to adjust the old system to work better, it just is missing the sexiness of a new system.

That said I do like Squarespace and give them a bigs thumbs up, they do have a free trail to test it out if you really do want to move

Good advice from @DrJJWMac and @Ben_Lincoln. I suggest you might also want to consider responsive design adjustments to improve the cross-platform experience for your customers. The site could be more usable when viewed on a phone – there’s quite a bit of truncation and navigation issues. E.g., the widget to access the menu scrolls off the top of the page. Since you are a museum, I assume a good portion of your audience would be looking for info on their mobile devices. Squarespace (as suggested) has templates that can help with responsive design.

After reading your replies I realized I should have been more clear.

The main reason for considering something simpler than Wordpress is that the museum staff has limited technical skills. They need to be able to make adjustments to the site, and the thought was a template based site, like Squarespace, would give them a better chance for success. The Hall of Fame section of the site seemed like the place where a typical template site would fall short.

In any case, the site is going to be redone. After thinking about this more, it will likely stay in Wordpress, and we will improve it throughout.

Thanks for the comments.

Thanks for the follow up. Best regards in moving forward. Perhaps you might provide a link to the revised site when it is done.


JJW