Denver Art Museum: Creativity Resource for Teachers
The Denver Art Museum’s Creativity Resource for Teachers website makes it easy to learn about different pieces at the museum and create associated lesson plans.
Strategy
We started by defining the target demographic and goals of the project. The main user of this website would be teachers with varying technical abilities. We therefore needed to create a site that, while feature rich, would be easy for any type of user to navigate. We kept navigation to a minimum and built in tools to create rich experiences within the content of each page.
Design
We carried elements from the main Denver Art Museum website forward into the Creativity Resource for Teachers website. This helps maintain a visual consistency for the Denver Art Museum brand. We combined pictures of students learning with the art pieces themselves on the homepage to illustrate the focus of the website.
Icons and calls to action across the site are big and colorful. From a usability perspective, we wanted all features to be clear and easy to use. View the video below to see a typical path a teacher might take through the site.
Development
We used Wordpress to power all of the content of the site, from storing images, videos, and audio to organizing lesson plans and lesson plan authors. The staff at The Denver Art Museum has access to Wordpress so that they can easily manage all of the content on the site and add new content over time.
We also added Flash, AJAX, and jQuery on top of Wordpress to enhance the front-end user experience. Sorting the art images, for example, pulls content from Wordpress dynamically using AJAX (see image below).
We had a great time working on this project. The site has received extremely positive feedback from the teacher community and we are continuing to make enhancements based on teacher recommendations.
Tags: wordpress
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