Peabody Essex Museum (1999)

This small museum in Salem, Mass. was nearing completion of a major renovation and expansion and needed a Web site that reflected its new look.

Overview

• Size: 6 sections, approximately 90 pages
• Complexity: HTML, CSS, Javascript, Perl
• Maintenance: Monthly

Challenges:

• Generate tourist interest in a small museum.
• Create large, clear images that were also highly compressed.

The prior Peabody Essex Museum Web site focused almost exclusively on its extensive maritime collection. With the Museum's physical expansion came a need to emphasize other themes. On the homepage, four rotating images effortlessly conveyed the breadth of the Museum's collection with no need for introductory text. The "In the Galleries" section contained many photos that needed to be reproduced clearly and as large as possible but without exceeding a total page size of 80k. A variety of image compression techniques created low-bandwidth images without sacrificing clarity and size.