JMM Insights: Welcome to Our New Website
All of us at JMM are very excited to introduce you to our new exciting user-friendly website. Especially in these COVID times, you can really stay in touch with JMM and experience our stories, our exhibits, our programs and our collections without leaving your home. Our new website is truly your window to the JMM, and in the next few issues of Insights, we will walk you through some of the ways our new website makes it easy for you to interact with JMM and stay connected.
This issue of Insights focuses on our homepage, widgets, our exhibits and events and some of our story pages. A special thank you to the staff of JMM and the marketing committee of the board for the many hours spent in creating this new dynamic website for you and to the William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund for the grant that made this new website possible. Please take a look at JewishMuseumMD.org and tell us what you think. We welcome your feedback.
~Bonnie Heneson, JMM Board Trustee and Marketing Committee Chair
You may have noticed a change or two during your last visit to the JMM website. Okay, maybe more than one or two – it’s a whole new site! The JMM team has been hard at work for the last two years (that’s right, I said years – creating a new website is no small thing) developing a modern, clean, mobile-friendly, and easy-to-use website. Starting with a lot of research of what you, our visitors and friends, want and need, through testing each link, page, and post on the new site, we’re ready to officially introduce our brand new site.
Let’s start our tour at the beginning: the homepage, JewishMuseumMD.org. It’s our way of welcoming everyone to JMM, whether it’s their first visit or their 500th.
Right at the top of your screen is the new navigation bar, one of the biggest changes from our old site – we went from double digits to six options. These headers appear on every page of the website, letting users find the most important (or “top-level”) areas of the site.
Next, we wanted a place to highlight big news, exciting events, and important announcements in an eye-catching way: enter the feature banner. Scroll your mouse across the images to expand each feature – a single click will take you straight to more information about the program, exhibit, or news items.
Our last stop on the homepage is one you will see throughout the site – our get tickets widget. Always located on the right side of your screen (or at the top of the screen on your mobile device), this widget gives you the most important information – what events are happening today, and what our next open hours for visitation are – and of course, a link at the top to reserve your admission tickets.
Now, let’s head to exhibits + events. Our goal was to gather all of our “things to do and see” into one place, making it easy for you to plan your experience, both in-person and online. We also know that people take in information in different ways, so we included both a list of upcoming events on the right and a more date-oriented calendar on the left. Clicking an event title will take you to more information and the “get tickets” button will send you directly to registration for the event.
One of our favorite features on this page is located below the calendar. Here you will find links to explore past, present, and future! You can find our recorded events, check out our special pop-upand upcoming gallery exhibits, and more.
This page of the website is constantly updating as we schedule events and exhibits, so we definitely recommend checking in regularly – you might even want to add it to your “bookmarks” for easy access.
For our next leg in this week’s website tour, we want to introduce you to the explore our storiessection of the site. At JMM, stories are the core of our work – telling stories, collecting stories, and creating stories. Here is where we bring many of those stories together for you to dive into.
We’ve divided our stories into four major categories – stories related to our physical collections, stories about our historic synagogues, stories about the Museum, and stories about our exhibits. Here are some examples of what you will find in each of these sections:
- The Stories Artifacts Tell (collections) – here are stories about individual items in our collections, information on using our collections for research, and ways to see our collections (including our online database), along with anecdotes and discoveries made by JMM staff while working with the collections.
- Synagogue Stories (our historic synagogues) – here are stories about the Lloyd Street Synagogue and B’nai Israel Synagogue, including video tours, The Synagogue Speaks exhibit, and everything from archaeological discoveries to renting the building.
- About Us: JMM Stories – here are stories about who we are (staff and board), why we do what we do (our mission and vision), and where we came from (our history). Plus news, future plans, our annual reports to the community, and information about Esther’s Place, our shop.
- Exhibit Stories – here are stories about our exhibits, from curator blog posts to educational resources to behind-the-scenes peeks at everything from exhibit installation to graphic design.
You might notice the right side of your screen looks a little different in this section – above the get tickets widget we have featured a number of “stories”-related goodies. At top you’ll find an image and link for our most recent blog post. The menu below will take you directly to certain categories of stories, like JMM News,stories about the Lloyd Street Synagogue, and See All Stories. In next week’s edition of Insights we’re going to take a closer look at the see all storiesand see all categoriesoptions and give you a quick tour of some of the amazing, entertaining, and illuminating stories you can discover and enjoy.
For the final piece of today’s website tour we’re heading to support JMM. Our goal was to help you find the best ways to get involved with the Museum in one place, so here you can find information about becoming a member, how to volunteer with JMM, and how to make a gift to help support our work.
We hope you enjoyed this first introduction to our brand new website. It took a lot of hard work and help from many people to make it a reality and we’re thrilled to share it with you now. We look forward to next week’s edition as we dive deeper into stories.