Thomas,

First a couple of questions for you:

What is your interest in museums?  Do you work at one? Are you a provider of
services or products for museums?  Is this a hobby? How will you support
this site?  Will you accept advertising?  How will you pay for 24/7
technical support?

To me, who you are and what your motivation for creating this site tell me
how seriously you will approach it's development and what resources you
actually have to develop the site.  You have listed a very wide range of
topics, information and services this site might provide and said that
server space and money are no limits.

Now, here are a few tips and what I would like to see:

Get a domain name and use a professional web hosting service.
I usually don't even bother to bookmark sites that end in /~username because
I figure they are just temporary sites.  Any web site that is built on web
space offered by an ISP vanishes when you decide to switch ISP's.  So if you
set up your web site using your ATT account... I won't take it too
seriously.

What is your marketing plan?
It sounds like you will want a lot of audience participation in your site.
How do you plan to let people know about the site?  How will they know they
can submit questions, articles, etc.?  How will you induce them to do this?
I suggest starting to make contacts with museum associations and trying to
get them involved, they can then connect you with people who might be
interested in participating.  From my experience, nobody wants to be the
first one to post a message in a forum/discussion group so you need a plan
to get this started and generate discussion.

It seems that a lot of the information you want to present is already
available on other web sites or via newsletters and magazines printed by
various museum associations.  Do you intend to join/subscribe to every
periodical and constantly visit every website to gather information to
reprint on your site?  What incentive can you offer to your potential
audience to get this information from you, rather than the original source?

I would suggest reviewing the museum'l archives and visiting every site that
is listed and try to find something that isn't already being offered.  There
are already several sites that are "link sites" that connect to existing
museum web pages.  You didn't state where you are from, but you may want to
offer regional information (at least to start) rather than trying to bite
off more than you can chew.  I would recommend contacting regional museum
associations and describing your project.  They may be able to get you back
issues of newsletters/magazines, which you could use as a starting point to
build a list of contacts of people you would like to contribute to your
site.  (You may actually have to pay for premium content).

Most important, prepare a coherent, focused description of what you intend
to to and why.  Many people will not want to donate a lot of time to a
"pie-in-the-sky" idea.  Remember, time is valuable.

You may want to visit www.freyaventures.com as I maintain a small list of
museum associations, that may be starting points for you.

Good luck.

Mark C. Vang
Freya Ventures
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>Date:    Thu, 29 Oct 1998 05:43:32 GMT
>From:    "Thomas (Pete) & Deanna Jordan" <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Museum Web Page

>I'm thinking about setting up a web page with resources for small to
>medium-sized museums. At first it would offer links to other sites and free
>resources like tips on how to preserve or display items, where to locate
>materials and examples of forms and computer program reviews.