Shoreline Historical Museum
A community museum's website, redesigned around what 35 visitors, volunteers and staff said about the old one.
The old site held everything people needed. It was just hard to find.
I started by going through the existing site screen by screen. A tall header filled the first view, the hours and contact details sat far down the page beside a stack of buttons, and blue link text ran on tan and brown backgrounds.
An accessibility scan flagged 10 errors and 9 contrast errors on the homepage.
I ran the page through WAVE, a web accessibility evaluation tool, to see what a screen reader or a low-vision visitor would run into. It also raised 10 alerts.
Then I asked the people who use it. 35 answered.
A Google Form went out in July 2025, shared with a QR code. Visitors, Shoreline residents, volunteers, museum staff, educators, a donor and a member replied.
The site was not broken: most people rated it 3 or 4. The opportunity was in the middle, turning "adequate" into easy.
In their words: dated, clunky, hard to read.
People also named what to keep: "Has all the info I'm looking for", "It's minimal", "Fast and responsive". The content was right. The presentation was the problem, and the brown tones divided opinion.
So the feedback set the goals.
Each change traces back to something someone said.
Two typefaces and the museum's own palette.
Homepage first, then page by page.
I wrote the plan up as a proposal for the museum on 14 December 2025, with the open questions listed for their approval: the homepage wording, the colour direction and the phased approach.