Walmart Museum launches first website

The Walmart Museum has launched a new website. The new site features Walmart’s history, links to exhibits, photos, videos, trivia questions and quotes from company founder Sam Walton.
The Walmart Museum has launched a new website. The new site features Walmart’s history, links to exhibits, photos, videos, trivia questions and quotes from company founder Sam Walton.

BENTONVILLE -- Walmart's Heritage Group is taking the Walmart Museum to the world through its first independent website.

The museum's online presence formerly consisted of one page on the retailer's corporate website. It was simplistic, static and offered little information and a few photos.

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The Walmart Museum’s website is www.walmartmuseum.c….

The website is designed to be browsed in. It functions on mobile devices, but the experience is ideal on a desktop computer, according to Dino de Leon, Shoptology head of creative.

Source: Staff Report

It was more like an online brochure and didn't meet the purpose of the group's goals, said Alan Dranow, senior director of the group.

"The whole point of the museum and the Walmart Heritage Group is to share our heritage," he said. "Heritage, in our definition, is where history, culture and brand meet."

The group engages and educates the public about Walmart's history. It oversees the museum, Walmart World magazine and Walmart Heritage Archives and is the primary resource for artifacts about Sam Walton and the company he founded.

Shoptology, a Fayetteville-based shopper marketing agency, designed the museum's first all-encompassing website over an eight-month period. It launched May 16 as part of the museum's 25th anniversary weekend.

There are several entry points on the website's main page. The most common is the link "Enter the Museum" in the center of the page. That takes the viewer to a horizontal timeline scroll of Walmart's history that includes links to the museum's exhibits, photos, videos, trivia questions and inspirational quotes from Walton.

"Everything that's in the museum is online, but not everything online is in the museum," Dranow said. "We have unlimited real estate out in cyber space. Here (at the museum) we have a limited footprint."

Once in the timeline, viewers can filter their searches using the "Browse by Media Type" link at the top left corner of the page. Filters include facts, videos, quotes, photos, exhibits and trivia.

"The digital medium affords so many opportunities that you can't get in person," said Dino de Leon, Shoptology head of creative.

De Leon used the special exhibit that gives an interactive 360-degree panoramic view of Walton's office as an example. Viewers can control what they want to look at, zoom in and even watch videos by clicking on certain items. It allows virtual visitors to enter the office, which is behind glass and not accessible to walk through in the museum.

There are more than two million Walmart employees around the world, and not all of them can come to Bentonville to visit the museum, Dranow said.

One of the challenges of building the website was to take all the information in the museum and make it as engaging in an online platform, said Susan McCarthy, Shoptology group planning director.

"Most of the time when you're building a website for a museum, you're trying to get people to come visit the museum, you're not trying to bring the museum experience alive online," she said.

The website is an example of a new field of "cybermuseology," McCarthy said. She defined it as preserving and sharing a company's heritage and culture online in such a way it creates experiences between content and user.

The design gives visitors more than one way to explore the site's contents, just like there are many ways one could explore a museum, she said.

It's not a website just for Walmart employees, Dranow added. It's a good resource for suppliers, business students, scholars, historians and even children.

"It's a website really for everybody," he said.

The hope is people get immersed in the site's content and the layers that create Walmart, its history, founder and people, de Leon said.

"We purposefully made it a very discovery-oriented website," he said.

Though the website is all-encompassing, it can't replace the experience of a visit to the museum on the downtown square, Dranow said.

"We still want people to come to Bentonville," he said. "You can't replicate the experience of the Spark Cafe and the 5&10 online. You just can't."

There are other elements that don't fully translate to the online world, such as being able to touch Walton's truck. Legend has it those who do are given the gift of frugality and will have more success in their business endeavors, Dranow said. It's a popular thing for employees to do when they visit the museum during Shareholders Week.

Launching the website has been like launching another museum. It has to be updated and maintained, Dranow said.

Ideas for additions include oral histories, more exhibits about different Walmart divisions and translation of the website into other languages.

"Just like the museum, it's always a work in progress," he said.

NW News on 07/03/2015

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