The High Desert Museum

"The new site gives visitors an exciting online view of the Museum, plus far more information than the old site.

"Just as important, it allows staff to update the site frequently, so it is a far more effective tool to inform and entice visitors by promoting what's new at the Museum."

Randy Heise, IT Manager

The Challenge:

The High Desert Museum relies on members and volunteers to sustain its programs and services. It needed a cost-effective way to develop and manage a website, and keep its web audience informed about upcoming events.

The Solution:

The High Desert Museum has been an Alpine client for a number of years. Their website recently underwent a complete redesign, bringing them up to speed with the latest web technologies.

With Center Stage Standard, the High Desert Museum is able to edit the content on their website and shuffle things around at will, without a dedicated webmaster. From changing hours to changing seasons, Center Stage lets them update it all without needing a bookshelf full of technical manuals.

Keeping up with mother nature.

As is the way with nature, things are always changing at the High Desert Museum. With the help of Smart Content Tables from Alpine, the Museum is able to use their website to quickly publish press releases and announce upcoming events.

The Alpine platform takes a tedious task and makes it a breeze, by automatically archiving old events and shuffling new ones to the top of the pile.

See Flash videos in their natural habitat.

Some people think that because Alpine makes content management so easy, we couldn’t possibly support the slickness of Macromedia Flash on our websites. Not so! When used effectively, Flash videos can add visual depth and zest to a normally static page, and this is exactly what the High Desert Museum has done with their new website.

The critters of the high desert are introduced through a series of Flash videos, which are elegantly embedded at the top of the page.

Yee-haw! The drought is broken!

With Rainmaker, the High Desert Museum is able to maintain contact with their visitors and volunteers alike. Alpine's targeted email marketing software helps them leap into the hearts, minds and inboxes of their audience, with the hope of turning prospects into visitors, visitors into repeat-visitors, and repeat-visitors into volunteers.

The opt-in nature of Rainmaker makes sure that interested parties are able to receive information from the Museum, and separate email lists make sure that the right newsletters are being routed to the right people.

Signposts for a new century.

The High Desert Museum has added a lot of content to its website through the years, and it was becoming difficult for their audience to find the information they needed. Alpine solved this problem with its flyover navigation package, which makes menus appear when people hover over navigation links.

Unlike many approaches to dynamic navigation that are slow to load and even slower to react, Alpine's flyover navigation is fresh and zippy, and uses the latest web design techniques to achieve the desired result.

What's more, instead of relying on proprietary browser extensions and scripting languages, our flyover navigation uses techniques based on open web standards. This means you can rest assured that your site is accessible by your entire audience, no matter what modern web browser they may be using.