Designing local history webpages

The final major individual project I undertook at the Mitcham Heritage Research Centre was to re-design and update the local history webpages. Maggy and I had been discussing the need for a website for the Centre ever since I began my placement, however it was the move from the old school house to the old police station that really promted the project. We agreed that with a bigger, better premesis the Centre now needed bigger, better promotion and exposure to the local community.
After finding out that space on the Council website was already available to us, and recieving training on how to create and upload pages, I was well on my way. The intention was that I would set up the pages, and then pass responsibility for them over to one of the volunteers when I left. In order to decide what to include, I researched other heritage pages within local council websites to establish what worked and what didnt. I also discussed with Maggy what she wanted to change or include. The main items noted were links to other heritage sites, making all in-house brochures available to download, information about what the Centre does, and a list of current and ongoing projects.
It took many weeks to put the pages together, despite the fact that all the formatting and headers were pre-set by the Webmaster. The pages went live early this year, and already I have had feedback from the Centre, saying that members of the community have visited them as a direct result of the information available on the site.
Please check out the webpages here:
http://www.mitchamcouncil.sa.gov.au/site/page.cfm?u=1514

I thoroughly enjoyed my placement with the MHRC, under the guidance of Maggy. I feel that I have learnt so many things about working in local heritage, with local government, volunteers and the public that I could not have learned off the job.

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