WOW! The language of the web?

I ran workshop last week for museum staff and trustees about how they can use the web. As well as being a way of sharing their collections every one of them saw it as a way of increasing visitors to their museum and wanted to know how to use it in their marketing activities. The pressentation is posted below.
The museums ranged from small independents, run for free entirely by volunteers, to a large visitor attraction which houses one of the largest collections of vintage cars in the world. The people attending ranged in age from 17 to 70 with a mix of Trustee, manager and student volunteer.
The general position was that the people in the room felt very little control over what was on the site or what it looked like, felt confused by how to update it and were at the mercy of techies about what they could and couldn't do on their website.
Having discussed the advent of the content management system we looked at everyone's sites - screengrabs in the presentation.
This revealed the usual ragbag of designs and styles. Some were more elegant than others, some were more complete or up to date than others. One was designed by the Chairman's son, whilst another cost about £20k, including a first version rejected at the last minute which had cost £10k!
Everyone had an excuse for something not being right on their site, or what they wanted improved, but few felt confident enough to comment on anyone else's site. I was happy to roll through, making positive and negative comments, and suggesting improvements, but it was a far from particpative part of the session.
I realised that many people feel alienated from the web as a medium - they were all regular users of it but lack a language with which to interact fully with it. These are people who have adopted to pseudo-business language of the current voluntary scetor - happy to talk about outputs and objectives and mission - but are feel unable to say that a site looks 'old-fashioned' or is 'basically okay but needs a few more pictures'.
The closest they got was at the start when I asked what they wanted from the day. Amongst various individual issues all agreed that their site needed a bit more 'wow' - and I soon realised that was about as articulate as they could be about what makes a website work.
It made me think we need to include similar discussions in all workshops - helping to build confidence by leading discussion as an 'expert' whilst making sure that people learn a language in which to express their ideas and begin to take control.

| View