The Abbe Museum contacted us about a year after their new website had been designed. They realized their website also needed a mobile counterpart in an increasingly online and on the go culture.
They were thrilled of the work of their web designer but the firm didn’t do mobile work, so we stepped in to help.
Since the Abbe Museum had a style guide we could work from, the work went more smoothly then it would have otherwise.
A style guide is document showing how logos, fonts, colors, and other design elements should be treated in all communications. If you don’t have one, you should consider making one for your business or organization because it means anyone producing communications for your organization will create something that is consistent and branded well- anything from a company event flyer to your website redesign two years from now. (I have seen these guides be anywhere from 4 to 25 pages- get as detailed about what you want but it is worth having a conversation about with your team!)
A style guide saved a lot of back and forth and meant we only had to do two design drafts to get the look and feel of the mobile site right.
Because the Abbe Museum’s website is coded in HTML, that meant we had to chose which pages would be mobile friendly since they would have to be individually coded. Based on the amount of web traffic they got and the importance of the information, the following pages were coded for mobile friendliness:
- Home page (obviously)
- Visitor information
- Calendar
- Current and Future Exhibits
- About
- Donate (just linking to their Paypal donate page)
In case users wanted to see one of the other 80ish pages on the site, we also have a clear link on the bottom of each of these pages to the full (not mobile friendly) website.
Besides creating and linking to the most important pages on the mobile site, we also made sure the most important marketing messages were front and center. The Abbe Museum’s marketing is driven by a strong email list as well as Facebook and Twitter.
Making anything we wanted users to click look like buttons was one way to achieve a simple streamlined page while creating some visual interest with colors.
If you want to check out this site, go to www.abbemuseum.org on your mobile phone or you can go to www.abbemuseum.org/mobile on any device. (When you access the Abbe Museum’s site from a device, it’ll automatically redirect you to the mobile link.)
Since the mobile site files are on the server (in a different folder), the Abbe Museum can update the information in them like they are updating their regular website.
We thank Cinnamon and Julia for being super easy to work with and hope the mobile site brings even more visitors to downtown Bar Harbor to the museum.