Searching a site for a museum allows a user a beforehand sneak-peak into what they would be experiencing with a real life visit. Visiting the web page for the Musuem of Fine Arts Boston, in the late days of May 2016, comfortable at home, I was allowed such an experience.
This experience was prompted by the content of the page, and its presentation by design. The page is up-to-date with a 2016 copyright, and uses contemporary design for website layouts. Entering the page was the lobby to the museum, from where I could decide which gallery to enter. My sneak-peak led me to the Contemporary Art collection. What better than to examine the contemporary art collection on a contemorarily designed webpage of an up-to-date, modern, museum of fine art?
With the first lines of the description explaining the historical significance of what it means for art to be “contemporary”, it is powerful to read that artists such as “Winslow Homer, Claude Monet, and John Singer Sargent,” who produced work as late as the 1920’s, were contemporary artists at the time of the museum’s acquisition of their work.
The description for the content of the collection is underneath images of -not pieces in the collection- rather, fellow visitors viewing the collection. As opposed to walking through a museum to examine the pieces, the webpage is more similar to entering the gallery area. Having a description as such- not small like is typical at the base of an artwork in the museum, but larger- loud like spoken words, positioned at the base of the images depicting the collection, offers a welcome and insight that would otherwise only be given in person, by a professional at the museum.
The page offers a different perspective to what a visitor to the site, and potential visitor to the museum, would assume the content of the collection would be- a mini personal tour. The art and history is at your fingertips before ever even deciding to step into the museum, but enough is left unshown and unexplained, that visitors to the site would be enticed, or excited, to go to the museum, and check out the collection itself.