Arts, Culture, and Museums 2013 WordPressCustom WordPress themeCustom post types and fields

Yuchengco Museum

In 2013 the Yuchengco Museum was running a static HTML site copied from Weebly, and its Information Officer updated it by downloading files over FTP, editing them locally, and re-uploading. I rebuilt it as a custom WordPress theme: an exhibitions archive split into current, upcoming, and past, exhibition pages with image sliders and artwork credits, an editable calendar of exhibits and events, booking forms for venue rentals, and a museum shop catalog the staff could maintain themselves.

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The Yuchengco Museum homepage with a grid of photographs of the museum's angular glass architecture and tiles for News, the Facets app, Exhibits and Events, and Sharing Life, Sharing Art

Summary

Details

The Yuchengco Museum houses the art collection of Ambassador Alfonso T. Yuchengco, opened to the public in September 2005, and sits along Ayala Avenue in Makati. Its previous site was static HTML copied from Weebly, and every update meant the Information Officer downloading files over FTP, editing them on her own computer, and re-uploading them. The brief was to make the site look current and to give the museum a content management system it could actually use, so I built a custom WordPress theme and walked the client through the admin, showing her past projects and explaining how custom post types would organise her content. Two post types carry the weight: Art Exhibit collects the exhibition articles with custom metaboxes for the details that sit below the editor, and Product collects the shop catalog with its own panels for authors, manufacturers, and price.

The rest of the site answers the questions a museum visitor actually has. Exhibitions are split into current, upcoming, and past, and each exhibition page carries an image slider with a credit line for every work — artist, title, year, medium, dimensions, and collection — alongside sharing buttons. An editable calendar of exhibits and events covers the whole programme, with booking forms for venue rentals and a section for the interactive Flash multimedia exhibits made by students of the Mapua Institute of Technology. There is a newsletter signup, a Books and Gifts shelf, and a map with the museum’s address and opening hours. For the design I took my cue from the building itself: the museum’s clean bisecting lines and geometric shapes became the homepage grid, and the palette is held to black, white, and grey with the red of the logo. The theme is responsive throughout.

Most museums do not need a bigger website; they need one their own staff can run. The failure mode is a handsome site that only the original developer can update, which is exactly where the Yuchengco Museum was when every exhibition change meant an FTP round trip. I build custom WordPress themes for museums, galleries, and cultural institutions where the content structure comes first: post types shaped around exhibitions and products, editing screens a curator or information officer can learn in an afternoon, and a design that stays out of the way of the artworks. If your institution needs a website the team can actually maintain, contact me about your museum website.