The Hyde Park Art Center's homepage (www.hydeparkart.org) has a lot of information but is not too busy or dense. It's sort of long, but I don't mind scrolling down--I prefer scrolling to clicking on tons of links and waiting for pages to load. Another visual strength of the site is the banner at the top that changes when you click on each category (Home, Exhibitions, etc.). This is a good way to incorporate artwork created at the center or photos of events that took place there into a part of the site's design.
When you click on links to current and upcoming exhibitions, there is a lot of information about each featured artist. This is a great feature that I'm sure helps pique people's interest and attract them to the center. Do any of the artists whose work is being exhibited have their own websites? How about providing links to their sites on the exhibition info pages so people can find out even more?
The School & Studio part of the site is comprehensive as well. The schedule of classes by day (in addition to the list of class names) is helpful--I would love for this to be more noticeable on the page about classes offered, and it would also be nice to have it in HTML (always preferable to PDFs). When I was working full-time and taking art classes during nights and weekends, I had to consider the schedule before choosing which class to take, so it's an important way to organize things. I was also happy to see a link to short bios of the teaching artists--when I sign up for an art class, I'm always curious about the teacher. It probably wouldn't affect whether I decide to enroll, but it's just nice to see that the HPAC is proud of their teaching artists and knows that their students care who they're learning from.
The 4833 blog is a great way to post pictures and news, but is there a way for the HPAC staff to approve blog comments before they're posted? There seem to be a lot of comments full of nonsense letters posted by users with sexually suggestive names. These comments are especially alarming on posts about kids' activities. I know Blogger lets you approve comments (sent to your e-mail) before they appear publicly on your blog, so I hope this wouldn't be too hard to remedy with the blog host for this site.
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16 years ago
Woah, good catch about the questionable blog comments. Your suggestion about approving the comments is quite true; not only should they edit those shady comments that have already been posted, but the approval settings would prevent it from happening in the future.
ReplyDeleteI'd also like to second your point about appreciating schedule content in multiple forms. I too prefer to consider these kinds of classes based both on their description as well as timing during the week. A PDF is nice to print, but for online viewing, you make a good point that the schedule in HTML form would be helpful.
excellent points about the site, caitlin. definitely, the comments section needs an update. the art center has in the past had comments that needed to be approved, but spammers seem to always find a way around it!
ReplyDeletedid you manage to find the a:list section of the site? it needs to be in a more prominent space, but it's an artist database of the art center's teaching and exhibition artists. it's got lots more info about individual artists.