I visited the website for the Metropolitan Museum of Art on February 17, 2009. The site, http://www.metmuseum.org, is owned by the museum, but it acknowledges a number of people for its creation through a link at the bottom of the page labeled “Acknowledgements”. As soon as I arrived at the website’s homepage I was impressed by the form and function. The design and color scheme of the website is consistent and the pages are free of cluttering advertisements. The website offers a number of ways to navigate, making it impossible to get lost or stuck at a “dead end”.

The home page of the website has three sections. To the left there are extensive links to an abundance of information about the museum. Links included Works of Art, Plan your visit, Programs and Events, an abundance of educational resources for students and teachers, and even an area to put together a collection of your favorite works of art called “My Met Museum”. The other two sections of the homepage offer links to current special exhibitions and selected highlights, which are popular sections of the website. These links are all accompanied by picture icons making it even easier to navigate.

One of the best things about this website is that it caters to a diverse audience including people who speak other languages, and the tech savvy people who enjoy podcasts or use Flickr for online photography. It has information on programs offered to school aged students and teachers, college students, families, adults, people with disabilities, and even Spanish speaking visitors. Everywhere you go within the site there is a link back to the home page and a link to any other place you would like to visit within the site. Also included on the bottom of the screen is an area of FAQ’s and a site index that gives a complete layout of all the information available to the sites users.

 After an evaluation of the site’s overall design, I decided to choose a link to one of the special exhibits currently on display called “Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard”. The link brought me to a page with dates and the location of the exhibit, along with background information on the exhibit. It is an exhibit of an American photographer’s collection of 9,000 picture postcards which were a direct influence on his own artistic development. During the early 1900’s, industrialization was pulling people away from home and the postcard gave them a way to maintain human connections. American photographers loved the idea of their black and white photos being turned into photo postcards and being sold across the United States. Walker Evans began collecting these postcards when he was young and they contributed to his own simple and “artless” style of photography.

I chose another link from this page to view images from the exhibit. There were fourteen nostalgic images of the U.S. as it used to be from the 1910’s to the 1930’s. The pictures included information on the time period and the author. My favorite image was “Main Street, Showing Confederate Monument, Lenoir, N. C.” which was produced in the 1930’s by an unknown author. The picture shows all of the old fashioned cars lined up outside with people walking down the street. It is one of those images that makes you wish the world still looked like it did in the 1930’s. After viewing the images I linked back to the main page for the exhibition to take a look at merchandise available in the Met Store related to this exhibit and also looked at the calendar to find dates for the exhibit. In the Met Store I was able to learn a little bit more about Walker Evans and his collections by reading the descriptions of each available item.

I felt as if I learned a lot from just visiting a small area of the Metropolitan Museum’s website. This website had so much great information that I could have spent hours just looking at it. The best part is that the website is really only a snapshot of what the museum has to offer, and it left me wanting to visit. If I were the designer of this museum’s website I would not change a thing. This website is a great display of what the humanities has to offer.