Managing and Growing a Cultural Heritage Web Presence: A Strategic Guide

Citation

McNicol, S. (2012), "Managing and Growing a Cultural Heritage Web Presence: A Strategic Guide", New Library World, Vol. 113 No. 5/6, pp. 307-308. https://doi.org/10.1108/03074801211226409

Written with practising web site managers in mind, Managing and Growing a Cultural Heritage Web Presence is full of clear, practical advice about developing and implementing a strategy to create an effective web presence. Rather than focusing on technical details, this book looks at the bigger picture, including policies and guidelines, marketing, metrics, the social web and managing a web site project.

As the author points out, organisations with huge budgets and teams, or conversely small operations, are able to respond quickly. It is those organisations, such as museums, with a limited budget which are often stuck “in limbo”. With this in mind, the first chapter looks at evaluating the resources you currently have. For this, and many other practical exercises described on the book, resources can be downloaded from the accompanying web site.

Content is the first main topic tackled; the author discusses methods of managing content for the organisation's web site, but also, crucially, monitoring relevant content from other web sites. The author then moves on to look at marketing, including search engine optimisation and online and offline marketing. Other chapters are devoted to traffic and metrics to track site usage; developing policies and guidelines related to online activities; and developing a strategic approach to the use of social media. Perhaps one of the most useful chapters comes towards the end of the book and is devoted to the web site project process, including writing a brief, producing a specification and working with external agencies.

This book is written in a clear and engaging style. It breaks down the process of developing a web presence into manageable activities and offers practical advice throughout. In addition to the drawing on his own experience, the author includes sidebars describing practice in all sizes and types of cultural institution.

Overall, this is a readable, highly practical guide, written with the needs of web site managers in mind. This would be an extremely useful text for web site managers new to the sector, or anyone charged with improving and developing the web presence of their museum, gallery or archive, no matter how large or small.