FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media contact:
Davinia Reed
713.526.1015
HMAAC Announces Radical Digital Website Redesign
Have you ever wanted to visit your favorite museum any time you want, even in your pajamas? Or listen in on all kinds of elevated conversations about art and culture? Welcome to the virtual Houston Museum of African American Culture.
September 2, 2020 HMAAC is pleased to announce the groundbreaking redesign of its website, www.hmaac.org. The site now features a cleaner and more contemporary design, including a more engaging user experience and enhanced navigation to help our visitors easily find the information they need and want. A vertical menu allows visitors to browse through exhibits, sit in on important and provocative conversations, and enjoy extensive use of video from the museum, around the web and from users, with a dynamic look and feel.
Although in response to COVID-19 HMAAC initiated its wildly popular and inexpensive Sunset Cinema drive-in movies, the museum staff and board still felt the need to further expand visitor engagement, locally and also nationally. The museum’s goal: to provide visitors from anywhere on the globe with a full museum experience online, and not simply an “Online Community” category. With the redesign, this goal is accomplished.
According to CEO Emeritus John Guess, Jr. “We have reimagined our website to be a community host as well as a site of museum authority.” Traditionally, anything presented at the museum was created or curated by HMAAC. “But what if,” Guess wondered, “we literally invited our community into our world. This redesign means that every space and service HMAAC offers has the opportunity to create a meaningful and potentially interactive cultural experience.”
The site reflects a pivotal point for HMAAC as it launches a new brand standard that replicates on the website the experience of discovery visitors are familiar with at the museum, with a design that allows users to Focus on What Matters Most to them whether that be music, performance, dance, film, the visual arts or poetry. According to Chief Operating Officer Davinia Reed, “We believe the new site will provide visitors with a unique user experience and quicker access to a myriad of content from the museum and from other visitors to the site.” Reed is especially pleased that the content includes expanded access to educational programs for visitors of all ages.
The new website will continue the museum’s history of innovation in reaching community that led to its becoming the most visited African American cultural asset in Houston; one that was trending toward 50,000 annual visitors before the Coronavirus severely curtained access to it.
“We have always been a museum in a building and in the community,” Board President Cindy Miles said, “and one that hosts conversations, especially difficult ones. This redesign will allow us to continue to do this and more.”
“Because culture is defined in terms of connection, discovery and personal fulfillment, we believe this website shift reflects our and the national arts and culture sector’s current reality,” Guess added, “and that means www.hmaac.org is now ours AND YOURS!”
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ABOUT THE HOUSTON MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE
The mission of HMAAC is to collect, conserve, explore, interpret, and exhibit the material and intellectual culture of Africans and African Americans in Houston, the state of Texas, the southwest and the African Diaspora for current and future generations. In fulfilling its mission, HMAAC seeks to invite and engage visitors of every race and background and to inspire children of all ages through discovery-driven learning. HMAAC is to be a museum for all people. While our focus is the African American experience, our story informs and includes not only people of color, but people of all colors. As a result, the stories and exhibitions that HMAAC will bring to Texas are about the indisputable fact that while our experience is a unique one, it has been impacted by and has impacted numerous races, genders and ethnicities. The museum continues to be a space where a multicultural conversation on race geared toward a common future takes place.
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