Preserved & Connected

Hi Morgan,

Thank you for the opportunity to propose a full redesign and rebuild of the Park City Museum website (parkcityhistory.org).

After our conversation and a close review of the current site, one thing stands out: the museum is thriving, and the site holds a tremendous amount of value, with decades of exhibits, oral histories, archival collections, research, and the stories that make Park City what it is. The design still holds up. What's weighing the site down is everything that has accumulated around it over the years. The museum's most important functions, including memberships, donations, the store, event tickets, and research orders, have drifted across a half-dozen disconnected tools, from Square to Eventbrite to SmugMug to emailed PDF order forms, with a retired WooCommerce cart still hanging on behind the scenes.

That fragmentation is the real story here, and it's why this is more than a redesign. Our goal is two-fold: rebuild the site on a clean, modern foundation that clears out the accumulated clutter, and consolidate the scattered transactional pieces onto a single central platform the museum controls. The brand stays. Your logo and colors carry forward. What changes is the experience for your visitors and the workload for your staff.

Project Summary

CHALLENGE

Over the years, the Park City Museum's website has accumulated layers of plugins, bolt-on tools, and structural workarounds that now make it harder to maintain than it should be. The design still serves its purpose, but the foundation underneath has grown tangled. More significantly, the museum's revenue and member management have splintered: memberships and donations run through Square, event tickets through Eventbrite, photo prints through SmugMug, and research and photo-permission orders through manually emailed PDF forms, while a partially retired WooCommerce system still lingers on the site. The result is a confusing path for the public, labor-intensive manual work for staff, and no single, reliable picture of members and donors.

SOLUTION
A redesign and rebuild paired with a deliberate consolidation strategy:

• Rebuild the site on a clean, modern, maintainable WordPress foundation, clearing out years of accumulated clutter while carrying forward the museum's established brand identity
• Reorganize the museum's substantial content (exhibits, research library, archives, oral histories, education, and events) into a clear, intuitive structure for both visitors and staff
• Consolidate the museum's transactional functions, including memberships, donations, the store, and internal research and photo charges, onto a single central third-party platform
• Integrate that platform cleanly into the new site, keeping the website a polished front door rather than the system of record
• Deliver a fully responsive, accessible site optimized for the way today's visitors actually browse

OUTCOME

A streamlined, modern website: easier for the public to navigate, dramatically simpler for staff to run, and anchored by one central system that gives the museum a unified view of its members, donors, and transactions. Built to last well beyond the grant period, and built to keep from fragmenting again.

INVESTMENT
$24,500, with work completed over 16 - 18 weeks from kickoff. This includes the full design and rebuild of the site using the museum's existing content, reorganized, modernized, and migrated, along with consolidation and clean integration of memberships, donations, store, and internal charges onto a single central platform. We'll provide training so your team is confident managing the site and the new system with us.

The best museum websites do something quietly difficult: they make a large, layered institution feel approachable. For the Park City Museum, our approach is about clearing away what has built up over the years and letting the museum's real strengths, its collection, its stories, and its place on Main Street, come forward. The brand you've established stays intact. What changes is how easily people can move through it.

Our design philosophy centers on three key principles:

Wayfinding for a Deep Collection
The museum's greatest asset online is also its biggest design challenge: there is a lot here. Exhibits, oral histories, archival collections, the research library, the Way We Were stories, the historic timeline. A first-time visitor and a returning researcher want very different things, and both should find their way in seconds. We'll build a clear, layered navigation that lets casual visitors plan a trip or join as a member without friction, while giving researchers and history lovers a direct path into the deeper material. The goal is a site that feels organized and inviting rather than encyclopedic and overwhelming.

One Seamless Path to Support the Museum
Today, supporting the museum means bouncing between Square, Eventbrite, SmugMug, and emailed PDF forms, with no consistent experience tying them together. We'll design the site so that becoming a member, making a donation, buying a ticket, ordering a photo, or paying for research feels like one coherent, trustworthy flow. Visitors shouldn't have to think about which system they've landed in. Behind a clean, consistent interface, the central platform does the work, and the website simply guides people there smoothly.

A Modern Frame for a Historic Brand
The museum's identity is already strong, and this isn't about reinventing it. It's about giving it room to breathe. We'll carry your logo and colors forward and build a refined, contemporary layout around them, with generous space for historic photography, exhibit imagery, and the stories that set the museum apart. The result should feel unmistakably like the Park City Museum: rooted in history, but clear, current, and easy to engage with.

The result: A website that honors the depth of the museum's collection while making it genuinely easy to explore, support, and manage. Modern and welcoming for the public, far simpler for staff to run, and built on a foundation that won't drift back into clutter.

We'll work closely with your team across two intertwined tracks: rebuilding the website on a clean, modern foundation, and consolidating the museum's scattered transactional tools into one central platform. The work is structured in clear phases that fit comfortably within the grant period, with collaborative checkpoints along the way so nothing moves forward without your sign-off. Specific dates and phase durations are outlined in the Timeline section below.

Discovery and Planning

• Kick off with a working session to align on goals, content priorities, and the platform decision
• Audit existing content and the current mix of transactional tools to map exactly what moves where
• Define a clear content plan and navigation structure for the rebuilt site
• Help you evaluate central platform options and make a recommendation; the final choice is yours

Design

• Design the homepage, a core interior page, and a full module library that pages are built from
• These modules will cover content-heavy pages (research, archives, exhibits), event pages, and the support and membership areas
• Carry your existing logo and colors forward, with a refined, contemporary layout built around them
• Fully responsive and designed with accessibility in mind

Development and Content Migration

• Built on WordPress using Bricks Builder and Advanced Custom Fields
• Rebuilt on a clean foundation, clearing out the accumulated plugins and workarounds weighing the current site down
• Migrate and reorganize existing content, including exhibits, the research library, archival collections, oral histories, the Way We Were stories, and the historic timeline
• Preserve and modernize event functionality through The Events Calendar
• Technical SEO best practices throughout: clean heading structure, meta tags, alt text, schema where relevant, and redirects from old URLs to protect existing search rankings

Platform Consolidation and Integration

• Integrate the selected central platform so that memberships, donations, the store, and internal research and photo charges live in one consistent, trustworthy experience
• Design the on-site flows so visitors move smoothly into the platform without bouncing between disconnected tools
• Coordinate with the platform vendor on setup and configuration of the website-facing pieces
• Migration of existing member and donor records into the new platform is handled in partnership with the platform vendor and your team, as that data lives within the platform itself
• This scope covers clean integration of the platform into the site; deep custom development inside the platform is not included unless separately scoped

Launch and Training

• Coordinate launch timing, final QA, and redirects with your team
• Train staff on managing the new site day to day, as well as the basics of the consolidated platform

Hosting and Maintenance

The rebuilt site stays on the Cinch Web Services hosting and maintenance the museum already has in place, with no interruption to coverage. We'll migrate the new site onto your existing environment as part of launch.

A project like this runs smoothly when a few things are in place. None are heavy lifts, and we'll guide you through each, but naming them up front keeps the timeline predictable and the scope clear.

• The platform decision, made early. The integration work can't begin until the central platform is selected, so confirming that direction early in the project is the single most important factor in staying on schedule. We'll help you get there.
• Existing content, ready to migrate. This project reorganizes and modernizes the museum's current content rather than rewriting it. If any sections call for new or substantially rewritten copy, that's easy to fold in, but worth flagging so we can plan for it.
• Imagery. The museum's historic photo collection is a real asset, and we'll put it to good use throughout the design. For any contemporary imagery the new site calls for (current spaces, staff, events), we'll look to the museum to provide it.
• Timely access and feedback. We'll need access to the current site and the relevant third-party accounts, plus reasonably prompt review at each checkpoint so the schedule holds.

A Few Assumptions

To keep the scope clear on both sides:

• The functions consolidating onto the central platform (memberships, donations, store, and internal charges) will be confirmed during discovery. Anything the museum prefers to keep on a separate service stays as it is.
• Migration of existing member and donor records into the new platform is owned by the museum and the platform vendor, since that data lives inside the platform rather than the website.
• The selected platform supports standard web integration. We'll weigh platform capabilities as part of the recommendation so this isn't a surprise later.