Dreamweaver CS3 [Any good templates to display museum artifacts for non-profit society website?]

[dans70962763]

Hi Everyone,

I maintain a website for our non-profit society. We are working towards building a museum and we would like to start taking pictures of our artifacts and putting them on our site. Unfortunately I'm an IT Analyst, not a web designer. I took over the site to save money and utilize Dreamweaver CS3. Does anyone know of a good template for a page that I can use in order to display our artifacts? If anyone wants to look at the site it is http://www.penholdbase.ca. I've done some work with pictures on the pages but I'm hoping there's an easier way.

Thanks in advance for any help or advice.

Dan

[John Waller]

Roughly how many artifacts do you forecast will be on the website?

Are you thinking of hundreds or thousands?

How often will it be updated? By whom? Multiple people or only those who own Dreamweaver?

Sounds like a job for a browser-based CMS so that any authorized person can update the website from any internet connected device. Jobs like this tend to be re-distributed on a regular basis within non-profits. If you move on, who takes over? I've seen projects like this go OK for a while then quietly die off when no-one takes over. I've also seen them work well over many years with a well-managed succession plan.

[John Waller]

What Nancy said. I would not use CS3 for this at all. Wordpress offers some great solutions.

Example templates

https://themeforest.net/tags/museum?referrer=search&sort=sales&utf8=%E2%9C%93&view=grid

IMITHEMES | Item : Vestige-WP

[Nancy OShea · Accepted solution]

A static HTML site is not going to be practical for what you're doing.  You need a dynamic site to handle membership, events calendar, fundraising, museum inventory, etc...

A template is the least of your concerns at this point.  You really need a long term plan and a solid web developer/coder to set-up the database and backend content management system.

I suppose you could use WordPress if you needed to.  It's not my preferred framework but a lot of non-profits use it successfully.  Blog Tool, Publishing Platform, and CMS — WordPress

There are tons of free and commercial Themes for WordPress, too.

Theme Directory — Free WordPress Themes

Or do a Google search for WordPress Museum Themes

Nancy

[dans70962763]

Our site is currently hosted by GoDaddy so I think WordPress may be something I will look into. We did have a developer to handle our site and do updates and she used Deeamweaver CS3 so I just carried it on. I find it rather difficult to add pages to and she used a different tool to make the menu bar so it was even harder to update.

Thanks for the info. I'll look into it.

[Nancy OShea]

Oh, and be sure to choose a Responsive Theme based on Bootstrap or Foundation to keep it mobile & tablet friendly.   More people use Tablets now than ever before.  So responsive web sites are a "must have."

Nancy