Museo&Web
Planning Kit for a Quality Site for Small and Medium Sized Museums
News
A Web Site is a continuously evolving entity and may need to inform users of additions, be they documents, press releases, announcements, events etc. In many cases, such as publication of laws, regulations, explanatory circulars and so on, informing users is indispensable. Users need to be informed of news on the Site and in the museum (Site News – Museum News) without having to browse the whole site.
Dedicate a part of the home page to News and for notifying users of new information present in the site.
Next to News, the date and time of the last up-date should be indicated. The list of news should be ordered with the most recent items at the top. Each item should show date of publication and a brief description of the published document. Items should remain in the list for a given time depending on the importance of the document. This should not normally be longer than a month from publication. During this time, if additional news is added, then it should take the place of older news. News of events should obviously remain in the list until after the event has concluded. The area for news should be clearly visible on the Home page. The secondary Home pages should also have a similar zone and news here should be only that related to the section.
News areas are often realised with programmes such as applet and script that give a sort of window where a number of items appear in constant movement. This makes the area inaccessible to users whose browsers do not support applet and script, who use screen readers and magnifiers or who do not use a mouse.