www.carlos.emory.edu

Summary
The Michael C. Carlos Museum, founded in 1919, has long been dedicated to collecting, preserving, exhibiting, and interpreting art and artifacts from antiquity to the present. Some 16,000 artifacts from ancient Egypt, the Near East, Greece, Rome, the Americas, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as works on paper from the Renaissance to the present day, provide visitors with a glimpse into the art and history of world cultures. The Carlos Conservation Laboratory also offers teaching and training opportunities for students interested in pursuing careers in art, conservation, preservation, and science.  Located at the heart of Emory University's Atlanta campus, the Carlos Museum serves as the South's premier museum of ancient art.

Problem
After years of continuous growth, the structure of the website needed to be overhauled to improve navigation and the overall visitor experience.  Not only had the Museum’s collection grown considerably, but annual participation had spiked to 100,000 visitors, 30,000 children, and almost 1 million internet users.  The original site contained outdated content and the design needed a more contemporary, professional image.

Goals

1. Identify a cost effective, yet scalable solution that would allow administrators the ability to seamlessly update content on the site.
2. Create a dynamic events calendar that would provide visitors up to date information on scheduling and activities taking place at the Carlos Museum. 
3. Better showcase the extensive inventory within the Museum’s bookstore.
4. Liven up the original site design to reflect a more professional look and feel within the parameters of the Museum’s existing color scheme and brand.

Solutions
Mediacurrent utilized the highly extensible, open source CMS called Drupal to build out the site. Drupal was an appealing solution because it allowed the Carlos Museum the self-sufficiency they needed to administer the site. Drupal is known for its flexibility, and the Carlos Museum site exemplified this.  We utilized over 30 modules to capture the desired functionality and features. For example, the more prominent modules included Calendar, CCK, ImageField, ImageCache Sitemap, Taxonomy, Upload, Tiny MCE, and Views. The trickiest part of the build out involved being able to theme the templates provided by Atlanta based design firm Times 3.  Due to time constraints, there were neither functional specification documents nor a master style guide to use as a roadmap. We were provided a few graphic mockups and a text-only sitemap to reference for the site’s design and functionality.

Another problematic issue we had to overcome was that the subpages had to be visually themed according to which section of the site the user is currently on.  This required custom theme overrides to display according to different content types within the site. For instance, this affected image swaps for the header area to reflect page status according to the section/content type. The different background colors along with the secondary and tertiary menus for various content areas had to be themed according to the site section. We resolved the theming differences by using Drupal’s powerful taxonomy system to dynamically apply specific CSS styles to various content types. Finally, we installed the TinyMCE module to resolve the issue of having non-technical users add, edit, and update content within the site.