Adventures in Web Design & SEO

 Let's Goooooo!

Did you know when you work for a nonprofit that you wear all the hats? #TheMoreYouKnow. 

While I served as the Marketing and Development Manager at the Ellen Noel Art Museum in Odessa, Texas, I took it upon myself to gift the Museum with a newly branded webpage. Why? Because I'm a glutton for punishment, apparently. 

All jokes aside, I wanted to leave my mark on the position. The museum was in the middle of a large capital campaign for a renovation to the building, and our web presence did not reflect all the amazing things happening. It was a SquareSpace site, and was not being updated. For context, there was so much turnover in the position managing the webpage and everyone on staff always had access to it, so it definitely looked like everyone had been posting to it. It was very hard to navigate how to make corrections because it had been hodgepodged by so many people until it was almost impossible to figure out how to do anything with it. Not to mention, the vibe was way off. The visual theme was black with red text, and images from exhibits from YEARS ago were still being utilized more than likely without a consent or artist knowledge. 

So I decided that would be my first project, and I would show them just exactly was my skill set was. Well let me tell you, its not web design and SEO. That was the longest 3 months of my career thus far. From strategic planning meetings with the Museum board, to incessant corrections of minutia, to just trying to figure out who hosted our domain. I definitely bit off a lot with this project. 

I studied other popular museum webpages and began mapping out on paper what pages would need to be created and what they needed to include. Then I got to work on starting from scratch with a new, bright aesthetically pleasing webpage. 

Here's the link*: https://www.noelartmuseum.org/ 

*I transitioned from the Museum in May of 2023, so I do not take credit for any changes or updates made to the website from that point forward.

Here's some snapshots:

Here is the landing page, where I showcased the renderings for the capital campaign and linked the text back to a third party webpage that the Museum had a designer create prior to my coming on staff. I wish I had snapshots of the previous webpage for comparison.

The calendar is updated quarterly as the newsletter of events is mailed out, and contact information is stored within SquareSpace from this widget.

The footer.

Including the Past Exhibits was a feat in itself. Because there is just so much information with images and text included, it would be too much to formally catalogue here, so that is on the Wishlist for the future. In the meantime, I linked these buttons to PDF's of all the information needed for the exhibits.

The Fundraisers page links the buttons to Jotform, where the Museum will finally be able to go digital! Previously everything was still kept on paper records and ticket sales were over the phone or in person. Now we have moved into the digital age. 

I was able to add neat features to break up static photos, text and graphics.

After putting on the final touches, I had to scour the Earth to figure out who hosted our domain because it was passed around through so many entities. After finishing that, I worked on SEO which I happen to know nothing about :) Thank you YouTube and Google for the crash course. 

I was able to create a guide on how to update the website and where things were housed such as analytics, and described what they meant for those taking my position after my transition. 

An update since I left the Museum:

The previous webpage had 24,000 site visits in 12 months.

The new webpage had 12,235 in 6 weeks! 

Overall this project was very basic, but appealed to what I prefer in visual design. A lot of negative space (hasn't changed much), and bright white color themes. I think this highlights the museum well because "anything goes." It's art and creativity and everything will fit well within this.