After reading through Chapter 5 this week, a few questions arose as to my group’s project. Firstly, who exactly will our website’s audience be? Our project will be connected to the National Park Service, and I envision them serving several different groups of people. These would include historians and other scholars, tourists, and teachers and students. Since these groups will most likely vary widely in their needs, our website must be able to accommodate them. It may be helpful to have different tabs on our website to make sure traffic flows to the area of the site that is appropriate for their uses. For example, our tabs could read “research,” “tourism,” and “teachers and students.”
A second question that arose was how do we advertise to increase traffic to our site? We do not have money to pay for something like this, but our site will be connected to the NPS, a prominent organization and resource for Civil War history. Because of this affiliation, I assume that we will not have to worry too much about this, but instead focus on what key words we can put on our site to make it come up in search engines such as Yahoo and Google.
A final question I had was about site maintenance and if our group will be responsible for things such as fixing broken links even after this semester has ended. Since we will be connected with the NPS, an established and respected organization, it would look unprofessional if a site created for them was not up-to-date. I know that Omeka installs updates automatically, but am unsure if this will be enough to keep our site looking fresh.
