A website for your museum

Most museums in New Zealand have no paid staff at all. They're run by volunteers, often through a historical society, and the website is either years old, or a Facebook page, or nothing. Meanwhile the thing in your building is the thing people type into a search box: family names, a farm, a wreck, a flood, a mill, a school that closed before anyone living remembers it.

A teacher planning a local history unit, a family historian chasing a name across two generations, a visitor deciding which small town to stop in on a long drive: they all begin the same way. If your stories only exist on a shelf, in a card index, or in a catalogue that nothing links to, they're gold buried under your own floor.

A website holds the answers still, where Google and the new AI search tools can find them: what you have, when the doors are open, and how to ask a question. It also reads properly to the people who fund you. A community trust or a heritage grants committee looking you up finds a front door, not a feed, and that quiet impression is doing work in the background of every application you make.

And the honest other side: if you already have a current site, your hours are easy to find, and enquiries arrive steadily, you may not need us at all. We'd rather say that here than waste a volunteer's evening.

Every volunteer-run society knows the story: the website was set up years ago by a member who has since moved away or passed on, the login went with them, the billing was on a card that's long cancelled, and now nobody can change the winter hours. That isn't a technology failure. It's an ownership failure, and it's the reason so many small museums are stuck with a site they can't touch.

Ours is built the other way. The domain is registered in the museum's or the society's name, never ours. Hosting is free, so there's no subscription to lapse when the treasurer changes. The whole site can be exported free at any time, so you're never locked to us either. Handover to a new committee is one line in the handover folder: “the website, changes by email to the studio, $20 a batch.”

The honest version first. On the day it goes live, the site is complete: every page written, every answer in place, nothing held back for a later stage. If you never send us another word, it carries on doing its job for as long as you keep the domain, and that costs you nothing further. Plenty of good sites are finished the day they open and never need to become anything else.

It can also grow, at whatever pace a volunteer committee actually has, because the studio stays behind it. You email us what's new, we draft it and send it back for checking, you tell us it's right, and up it goes: $20 for a batch of edits, and small changes can usually be done quickly. And if something on the site is wrong, we fix it for nothing, because that is not a change, that is us not having got it right. Told over years, that turns into something a one-off build never becomes. A few more object stories a year, until the best of what you hold is findable by the people already searching for it. A page of its own when an exhibition opens. A research enquiry answered once, properly, then published so the next person who asks finds the answer already waiting. The society's newsletters gathered into an archive that grows an issue at a time.

Every build can also include a site assistant, which answers a visitor's questions from the site's own words and nothing else, so someone reading late at night gets the answer you would have given them at the door. It's included in the price and switched on only if you want it. All of it stays yours either way: the domain in the museum's name, nothing monthly, and a free export whenever you want it.