Overview

Museums Sites is an integrated website, collection management and exhibition and events managemement system designed especially for small and medium museums, with a sophisticated yet streamlined approach to the management, publishing and sharing of all information in a typical museum/collection.

For a fixed annual service charge, Museums Sites offers all of the following:

  • Integrated Content Management for the website, collection, exhibitions, news and events - and much more
  • Flexible, customisasable front end templates, optimised for desktop and mobile users
  • Templates especially designed for mobile users
  • Collection Management System, including Digital Asset Management, based on Keepthinking's Qi
  • Dedicated Hosting, including failover and backup (Full details)
  • Maintenance and support, including regular new features.

Computer screen and iPhone showing the Pre-Raphaelite Gallery home page

The standard package

As standard, Museums Sites allows any museum, art gallery, collection or cultural organisation to create and manage all of their information on an easy to use and comprehensive web-based software application. With museums sites, organisations can:

  • Manage their collection, including acquisitions, conservation, loans and much more
  • Manage their website, including all visitor information, images and multimedia content
  • Create a successful user engagement policy with with connections to social media tools
  • Create and manage exhibitions and events and link them to collection objects and any other type of content
  • Manage all of their media assets, including images, audio and video

The standard package includes eleven templates, covering the basic (and not so basic) requirements of a typical museum: home page, collections, what's on and many more.

Montage showing the various layouts included in Museums Sites

Add ons

Although the basic Museums Sites package already offers a lot of features and functionalities, your organisation may want something extra: this is the role of add-ons. Museums Sites has been designed and developed for flexibility and growth, from more sophisticated collection management system, to bespoke design, interactive features (maps and timelines) and much more. For an overview of typical add-ons, please see this section. While if you'd like ideas about how to make your website stand out, you may have a look at the Keepthinking's portfolio.

Design

We designed Museums Sites as a contemporary, stylish museum website, which can be customised by changing its entire colour scheme, as well as the museum/organisation logo and core information. The customisation options, combined with your own images and content offer thousands of different possible combinations for truly unique websites.

The design can be further customised by adding a bespoke design add-on.

Sample pages showing different customised designs

Mobile version

Museums Sites includes as standard all of its templates in an optimised version for mobile devices, fully tested on iOS (iPhone) and Android.

The Pre-Raphaelite Gallery website displayed on a blackberry and on iPhone

Larger museums

We say that Museums Sites is for small to medium size museums. But Museums Sites is also a great starting point and framework for larger museums, which can capitalise from the range of features already built-in and simply add the extras. This makes creating a large website quicker and more cost effective. Keepthinking has many years of experience designing and building large scale websites, from the award-winning National Galleries of Scotland to the British Council Visual Arts, among many others.

Computer screens showing the National Galleries of Scotland and the British Council Visual Arts home pages

Information architecture

Each Museums Sites package comes with a pre-defined information architecture and site map, to get people started. Pages and sections can be added, removed and edited as necessary, using the easy to use administration interface. The pre-defined architecture includes all sections and pages that are typically needed by a small/medium museum.

Qi

Museums Sites is based on Qi, a state-of-the art, fully-fledged content and collection management for any type and any size of collection and content. See full details about Qi.

Qi and Museums Sites logos

Coming soon...

Despite the amazing range of features offered by its basic package, Museums Sites will expand its offering regularly, including:

  • New features and templates created regularly and included in every package. Features may be created out of our own research or based on customers' feedback and requests.
  • A portal website featuring all museums using Museums Sites, including the collection of the week and highlighted objects. This will help greatly promoting your organisation and collection.
  • And many more ideas we cannot disclose yet...