A museum website built around what's happening this week
WOW! Children's Museum in Lafayette, Colorado had outgrown its hosted Firespring site. As the museum's marketing and communications manager, I led the rebuild onto WordPress and Divi, writing custom code wherever the off-the-shelf tools fell short.
The situation
Families come to a children's museum website to answer a few questions fast: are you open, what's on today, how do I get in. The old hosted platform limited how much the team could change on its own, so the homepage drifted out of date.
The harder problem was programming. A busy small museum runs a lot of different kinds of programs, each with its own schedule and rules, and off-the-shelf calendar plugins couldn't model that without constant workarounds.
What I built
A Divi child theme with all the custom work kept in the theme, and a bespoke events calendar built to match the museum's program structure instead of forcing programs into a generic event format.
Tag an event "Featured" and it shows up in the homepage What's Happening cards. Tag it "Spotlight" and it gets promoted to a banner slot above them. Staff profiles run on a custom Person post type with flip cards.
Launch also covered a site alert bar, a promotional pop-over, analytics, an SEO first pass, and a full 301 redirect map so old links keep working.
Highlights
- Custom events calendar built around the museum's real program structure
- Featured and Spotlight tags let staff steer the homepage without touching layout
- Staff directory on a custom post type with flip cards
- 301 redirect map from the old Firespring URLs
