Website Design and Development
A century of small-town history, finally easy to browse
The Society keeps the record of the Town of Livonia and its six hamlets, and runs the Maurice F. Sweeney Museum. It is volunteer-run, which shapes every decision on a project like this: whatever gets built has to be cheap to keep online and simple enough that a volunteer can update it a year from now.
They were on a WordPress site built with a page-builder theme. It was slow, it was awkward to edit, and the parts of it that mattered most, the photographs and documents the Society has spent decades collecting, were buried.
The brief was really about the archive. A historical society's website is a front door to its collection, and theirs was making people work to see it.
We rebuilt the site so the archive is the design rather than an afterthought. Scanned photographs are framed and captioned like plates in a book, with the index of town history laid out in rows you can scan quickly.
One constraint drove a lot of it. The largest scan in their collection is under 1000 pixels wide, so blowing a photograph up to fill a screen would have made their best material look worst. The layout frames images at a size they can actually hold, and the hero uses a blurred scan as atmosphere behind a sharp one, which gets the feeling of the archive without pretending the files are bigger than they are.
We also moved the domain, kept every old page address working through redirects so nothing they had shared over the years broke, and made sure their email carried over untouched.
Static pages with nothing to patch and no monthly platform fee. It will still be running, and still fast, long after this year's board has changed over.
Every address from the WordPress site redirects to its new home, so links in newsletters and Facebook posts going back years still land somewhere.
The layout is sized to the archive that exists, not the archive we wish existed. Nothing is stretched past the resolution it has.
Every project here started with a conversation about what the business actually needed. Yours can start the same way.
Get a Free ConsultationQuestions? We can help.
Reach us any way you like