Hello

Hello. You’re probably wondering what this is all about.

Museuminaday is almost exactly what it says on the tin: a museum website that we intend to design, build and launch in 12 hours. Most of the work will happen during a single day (2nd November 2009 – and we’ll be filming and live-blogging on that day) but we’re also documenting everything we do before then and taking time off our 12 hour deadline as we go.

Why would we want to do this?

Firstly, we (Dan Zambonini and Mike Ellis) have written and talked a lot about how making (museum) websites should be easy. We’ve written and talked, talked and written, and now is the time to put our money where our mouths are. Mouth is. Or something.

Secondly, we think if we document everything that we do along the way then it’ll be a useful resource for anyone else (museum people and maybe non-museum people too) who wants to set up a similar web presence.

We’re not experts, by the way. We’ve built a few websites in our time, and hung around the cultural heritage sector for long enough to know roughly how it works, but we also expect some things to go wrong. These will be part of the learning process for us, and hopefully will either help people avoid these issues or be able to take part in a conversation about how best to approach stuff in the future. If at the end of the day we utterly fail to create a museuminaday then that will be a learning piece, too.

We intend to be completely open about the process, and will be giving talks (starting with one at DISH 2009 about what we learned. We’d be delighted to have you along for the ride, too. You can follow us at http://twitter.com/museuminaday, or here at http://museuminaday.com

Dan Zambonini (@zambonini)
Mike Ellis (@m1ke_ellis)