A new look with new functions and an eye towards the future.
Waterfront Barge and Showboat Museum
The Waterfront Museum & Showboat is a refurbished all-wooden barge built for the Lehigh Valley Railroad in 1914 that is docked in New York Harbor in Red Hook, Brooklyn and serves as a maritime museum. The museum focuses on the Lighterage Age of shipping and serving as a venue for plays, and art installations as well as an event space for weddings and movie/video shoots.
New Design and a Rebuild
The previous site was built over 10 years ago in Drupal. We completely redesigned the site form the ground up and moved them to WordPress which was conveniently a better known platform for their staff.
Updating Functionality
The museum also needed new functionality on the site. A new calendar that offered them the ease of setting up single and recurring events, as well as the flexibility to add non events into the calendar and event carousel output. In addition we did a full ADA audit and update.
Maintenance & Task Team
As a small non-profit, they get the best of both worlds by having us be their Maintenance and Task Team. Providing constant updates and monitoring with the ability to make content, design or function changes as needed has helped to keep them growing.
Managed Hosting
Their original host had been bought and sold a few times in the decade plus they used them. The servers were slow and the support was barely responsive. Moving to CDTW Managed Hosting gave them faster loading times but superior monitoring and service to boot.
Project Scope
After 10+ years with the same website, the Waterfront Barge was ready for a new look. In addition to a redesign, they also needed some new functionality that the old site did not have, and update processes that did not work well for them. Mainly they wanted to have a better method for displaying upcoming events (art shows, plays, circuses, etc). As well as an easier method for updating the website. Working closely with the Museum, we were able to do a complete redesign while maintaining the maritime feel of the old website that they wanted to keep by utilizing a simple background of the barge exterior. There was also a lot of content that needed to be migrated over from an old Drupal 7 site. Working together, we helped in collecting and organizing the items that were to then be curated by the museum for final inclusion on the site.
Our team settled on The Events Calendar for the main engine to use for the events. The Events Calendar seamlessly displays upcoming events in both a list and a monthly calendar. They also had other items that were not technically and “event” but needed to be in the calendar workflow. By creating a new “non-event” content type with ACF we were able to set the new post type as an alternative ‘event’ which made it available to be displayed in the events section as needed.
Finally, the site was built to be able to expand the in the future. They have a future plan to offer an interactive exhibit for their visitors which will be part of the next phase some time in 2024.
Over the years, your attentiveness and prompt attention in troubleshooting issues that have arisen have made general maintenance of our site a snap. I appreciate the personal attention you continually provide and am especially thankful for explanations that don’t require a struggle to understand. Your help and support even made the installation and broadcasting of our 24/7/365 harbor cam a breeze.
Thanks so much for making our internet presence a great success. Your products allow the Museum to promote our activities, address our mission, and share our stories, which hopefully will be cherished for generations to come.