The new MCG logo

Over the past few months, we’ve been working away behind the scenes on a new Museums Computer Group website. Probably the first thing you’ll notice is that we’ve re-designed – new colours, new logo and a new look and feel.

The old site (as many of you probably noticed) was pretty badly out of date both visually and structurally, and although we did some work to make it look a little bit better a year or so ago, under the hood we suffered from several structural and technical issues which hampered us in keeping content fresh.

This new site has been built using WordPress MU, a multi-user variant of everyone’s favourite open-source blogging engine, WordPress. WordPress – as I’m sure everyone is aware – is a hugely powerful and yet simple-to-use blogging engine which is increasingly being used to content manage sites such as this one.

I’ll write a post in the future (when site launch isn’t less than a week away…) outlining some of the technical decisions that we’ve made, including which plugins we use and why, how we’ve made WordPress “less blogging engine, more cms” and so on.

For now, the important thing I’d like to make you aware of is what we’ve done (and are doing) with the content from the old Museums Computer Group site.

Although that old site wasn’t hugely content-rich, there was still a fair amount of information from past meetings including AGM notes and so on, and we’re keen that we preserve these by migrating as much as we can onto this new site, but also try to retain the simplicity of the new site as possible. We’ve started migrating old bits of content, but this is an ongoing job and we’re all volunteers who do this as well as day jobs, so please bear with us over the next few weeks and months.

What’s on the new site

The main sections of the new site have pretty much stayed as they were on the old one. The bulk of the content is in the meetings section: here you’ll see that there are two options: archived and current. These should be self explanatory(!) – we’re still working on how best to attach meeting notes to past meetings and so on, but should have this sorted shortly.

Over on the right hand navigation, you’ll find links to the pages in the section you’re currently browsing, the latest conversations from the MCG email list and some other bits which should help you move around the site more easily.

You might also want to read more generally about what the MCG does and what our constitution entails – we’ve also updated the MCG committee pages with pictures and bios.

If you have any suggestions or there’s anything you feel should be changed on the new site, please use the contact form, comment on this post, or click on the “Feedback” tab on the right of any page and follow the instructions.