Pimp My Website: Tech Tools to Redesign and Reinvigorate Museum Websites on a Budget

While there’s been a lot of excitement about new audience-engaging technologies such as Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and SecondLife, most museums simply don’t have the staffing or budgets to constantly create new sites, games and functionality.However, many institutions DO have a wealth of legacy, evergreen content that is still popular but may not have aged gracefully in terms of browser compatibility, design and support of social networking features or multimedia. How do they keep them alive – and augment them – with the advent of new technologies, browsers and platforms?All museums are looking for ways to stretch Web and marketing budgets as well as maximize staff time. By showcasing enhancements and upgrades to existing sites and functionality using tech tools that are readily available, easily implementable and free (or extremely inexpensive), museums of any size or focus can not only keep their existing content relevant, but also feature the latest and greatest without a complete site overhaul.