The National Mississippi River Museum unveiled its newly designed website on Tuesday. The redesign was made possible through a partnership with Triad Advertising in Ohio, resulting in a captivating and full-responsive website that showcase the family-friendly experience the River Museum is known while blending in timeless historical elements to align with the organization’s branding and mission. Perhaps the most notable change to the website is a shift from a .com to a .org as visitors can now find all the information for the River Museum, Dubuque County Historical Society, Mathias Ham Historic Site, National Rivers Hall of Fame and RiverWorks Discovery at rivermuseum.org.
“Change is inevitable—our campus alone has continued to change and evolve over the past 20 years, and as we celebrate this milestone year, we feel this change came at a great time. We are beyond thrilled with the way the website has come together and we cannot thank Triad and our internal team enough for helping make this possible,” said Wendy Scardino, Vice President of Development & Marketing. “Our mission is to create educational experiences where history and rivers come alive, and the look and feel of this website highlights that. Aside from the new look, we are extremely happy with the digital accessibility additions we’ve made to rivermuseum.org with the Recite Me toolbar and interactive map.”
Through the process, the River Museum took intentional care to develop a website that would support digital accessibility, adding an interactive campus map and accessibility plugin powered by Recite Me.
As the River Museum continues to make a commitment to an accessible experience for visitors onsite and online, website visitors are now able to access a wide range of accessibility and language support tools to customize their digital experience through Recite Me assistive technology. More than 25% of the population may encounter barriers when exploring websites due to having a disability, learning difficulty, visual impairment, or if they speak English as a second language.
The Recite Me assistive toolbar, accessible via the human icon on the River Museum website, includes screen reading functionality, multiple reading aids, customizable styling options an on-demand live translation feature that boasts over 100 languages including 65 text-to-speech and styling options.
The interactive map maintained the original simplistic and easy to read design with the technological enhancements to click into specific exhibits and areas for more information. The responsive mobile-friendly version will provide guests with another way to navigate campus while on their visit or catch a glimpse of what to expect ahead of their visit.
Visitors are assured that accidentally typing rivermuseum.com will still redirect to the new website, and staff emails have also changed to .org, but will still receive .com emails. The River Museum encourages community partners and contacts to update their contact list. Any additional questions can be directed to info@rivermuseum.org.