I have spoken before about why museums and other cultural institutions should spend time developing web apps rather than mobile apps, and how to go about developing for the mobile web, but now Jim Richards and the team at Sumo Design have made their lives even easier.
SiteShrink is a new platform that provides:
“A low cost, high impact solution to make the websites of cultural venues work on mobile phones.”
On the face of it, SiteShrink would seem to take the very real pain out of developing a mobile web strategy for your museum, but how good is it? At £600+ you can’t argue that the starting price doesn’t offer an exceedingly accessible option for even the smallest museums, and with more and more people accessing sites through mobile devices the benefit to them is huge.
Fine-Tuned Mobile Websites
One of the clear benefits of SiteShrink is that it provides clean and well laid out content from the outset, with an initial outline to suit any museum. SiteShrink starts with What’s On, Visit Us, and Social, but has the ability to bolt on any number of desired sections in a totally modular fashion.
To those used to seeing sites in a regular desktop, the SiteShrink’ed mobile sites may seem a little spartan, but they are created with best practices in mind, ensuring low overheads, strong navigation and concise information. SiteShrink works within a very clear remit and it doesn’t bend to the need to be all things to all people, and most certainly isn’t trying to recreate a museums “main” web site for the mobile arena. It may not be pretty or sugar-coated, but it works!
Ring-Fencing Cost & Development Needs
Another beneficial aspect to using SiteShrink is that it minimises the needs of development (time and money). A museum can go from 0-60mph and a matter of seconds and not worry about whether their content displays properly, not just on an iPhone, but on any mobile device. This is because the team at Sumo have taken care of this during the process of developing the SiteShrink product. As is the case for any web development project, the risk of bringing it in house is not only one of cost bloat, but also the technical expense of cross-platform testing and providing full and proper function. SiteShrink helps ring-fence time and cost.
Changing Landscape
With the changing landscape online, from social networks to location services, museums can no longer remain as they were. They really do have to take control of their space online and SiteShrink really helps do that. But let’s not get confused with the overall change in topology of the internet landscape and surfers use of it. Those arriving on mobile devices are far-less likely to be arriving from search and are infinitely more driven, with a single focus and need for information, this is clear in the recent post from the Powerhouse Museum, A Little Mobile Data. SiteShrink itself doesn’t preclude any museum from creating mobile micro-sites, but of course as is clear from the stats and per its obvious design and limited scope, this is not the focus on it either.
Mobile for Museums
There is of course a tiny but growing field of mobile apps and site platforms for museums, and even action groups based round the topic, such as Museums-to-go, with plenty of excellent documentary guidance on the topic. Fore those willing to take the time to customise the experience for users themselves there are themes and plugins for blogs and content management systems such as WordPress, but these all require in-house expertise.
For those less encumbered by the notion of limited access, there is a growing market place of apps as a platform for museums on the iPhone, but as elucidated above SiteShrink really focuses on a more accessible means, and on a more device agnostic approach, something the largest group of mobile users, on the Android installed base, would appreciate I am sure.
Conclusion
All-in-all I think SiteShrink is a decent little offering for museums and cultural institutions wishing to setup a mobile site swiftly. It’s a no-nonsense offering at a more than reasonable starting price based on a “you host it yourself” model. The product shows that mobile WWW setup doesn’t have to be painful, and that you can very easily embrace the brave new world of mobile media, without having to take a serious hit to your budget or worry about the quality of the work accomplished or the accessibility of the content hosted thereon.
Web-head & art collector, living in East London and huffing on the fumes of the planet since '78. Here are my thoughts.
Francesco Cetraro Sep 9, 2010
Re: your article “SiteShrink – Off The Shelf Mobile Sites for Museums”, the price of €600 seems outrageous, particularly if one-off events are involved. Much better solution for ~$5/mo at http://gomobi.info. Yes, I am with the company, but we’ve optimizing doing mobile content for years and have taken down the price point several orders of magnitude. Sample site for your phone at http://centr.ie.mobi (works on any domain though). Open to your thoughts good or bad as well. Thanks.
Vincent Roman Sep 9, 2010
Francesco – Thanks for the comment and I am glad the article piqued your interested enough to comment.
Over the years I have worked in companies that charge clients an inordinate of money to build web sites, even more recently I have been looking for quotes on a web site upgrade for a medium web site, and the quotes are coming in ate 000′s of euros. Why? Because human endeavour costs money.
To claim that your service is only 5 euros a month, might be true, but what about the cost of the time it takes for that company, individual or anyone else to set up the site? Their time costs money no?
The other thing you need to realise is that plenty of people are willing to pay for hand holding. I certainly do. When I hire a professional web dev or a company, I expect them to do the job properly end to end, and that’s worth paying for.
Certainly if you are going to compare 5 euros with 600 euros please at least compare like for like. It would be disingenuous to do otherwise.
Compared to the six figure sums being charged to clients for projects when I worked on websites at Stink Digital and the rates for each employee on a project of up to 600 euros a day, I think that pretty much blows EVERYTHING out of the water.
Sometimes you just need to put things in perspective. Sure 600 euros “ain’t the cheapest” but it sure as hell “ain’t the most expensive”.
George - Planet Anarky Sep 9, 2010
Good write-up of the service: as you say, the pricepoint for an end-to-end solution such as this is pretty accessible by even my standards (and I’m so poor I’m eating dust from under the desk).
R.e. Gomobi, it doesn’t look in the same league to be honest. I visited that example link on my HTC Desire, and there’s visible HTML all over the place in the “Where & When” section, for example. It doesn’t seem geared up to deal with the needs of media-heavy sites (as culturally-orientated ones would be), and working out how best to optimise the content.
Additionally, there’s the likes of http://www.wapple.net, who offer a canvas that allows you/your developers to restructure content so it’ll show on the majority of handsets – and the service is free (bar, of course, your developers time!).
P.S. thanks for the SiteShrink tip: I may have a use for that!