Newsletters

We're still refining and revising aspects of our wonderful new website (designed by the Adsmith), and one of the most recent parts to go live is the section where you can browse our newsletter in a full-page format. Just click to read it, then click again to zoom in.

GMOA in the News!

Following up on this last blog post that mentioned some of our press releases receiving coverage in the media, have you checked out our new press room yet? Our entire website has been given a redesign and a makeover by The Adsmith, and we're very happy with the results. For the newest press releases in an easy cut-and-paste format, click on the "about" tab on our homepage and select "press room."

The most recent include a release on an artist's talk by Steinunn Thorarinsdottir coming up on Tuesday, March 29, and one announcing the hire of Caroline Maddox, our new director of development, who started work March 1. The marvelous Ms. Julie Phillips at the Banner-Herald threw us some love on the former on her tumblr.

We've also been all over the brand-new Athens Patch, including in a long article by John English.

And we'd like to point you to this article and video produced by UGA as part of its 2011 Celebration of Support on GMOA patron W. Newton Morris, whose foundation supports so much of our programming.

Extraordinary Athens

Extraordinary Athens, a project that uses the stories of people in Athens as inspirations for art, is launching with an open house on September 15 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the Lamar Dodd School of Art in Room S-160. The developing site has stories about incredible people living in Athens, and each story has its own artistic interpretation, anything from poetry to music and, of course, visual art. A section of the site allows people to submit their own stories and art. Although the site is still growing, it's easy to see how interesting Extraordinary Athens will become. There are already some pretty incredible stories posted, and not only can we read stories about these amazing people, but we also get the opportunity to see creative interpretations. Ji Eun Moon, Hunter Parker and Marie Porterfield, the makers of Extraordinary Athens, are graduate students at the University of Georgia and research assistants with Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE), which is a program for arts research at UGA that supports various projects, including Extraordinary Athens.

Rankings

Jenny Gunn passed along this link, which charts the relative popularity of various museums' websites. Unfortunately, GMOA's not included in the top 200, but university museums in general seem to be lower ranked, probably partially due to their smaller audiences and partially due to their URLs. We're working on getting a more functional URL for our main site, preferably something that doesn't involve a slash and is more intuitive. We can't even find our specific site on Alexa, just the general UGA one. Anyway, it's worth a look.

Web Redesign

As part of our expansion and renovation, the museum is working on a rebranding as well, which will involve a redesign of our website, so we've been paying attention to what others in the field are doing, and you may already have noticed some changes, such as a greater emphasis on new media and a simplification of some pages. A few weeks ago, we noticed that the Montclair Art Museum had won an award of excellence from Graphic Design USA for its site, and over the weekend, the Guggenheim announced its receipt of a Webby for best cultural institution website. What would you like to see added to our website? Removed? Changed? What works and what doesn't?