BENTONVILLE -- The Walmart Heritage Group is taking the Walmart Museum to the world through its first independent website.
The museum's online presence used to consist of one page on the retailer's corporate website. It was simplistic and 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, 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 heritage group's goals, said Alan Dranow, senior director of the Walmart Heritage 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 Walmart Heritage Group engages and educates the public about Wal-Mart's history. It oversees the Walmart 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 Walmart Museum's first all-encompassing website over an eight-month period. It launched May 16 as part of the Walmart 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 Wal-Mart's history that includes links to the museum's exhibits, photos, videos, fact squares, trivia questions and inspirational quotes from Sam 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 cyberspace. 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 referenced an interactive 360-degree panoramic view of Sam Walton's office as an example.
One of the challenges of building the website was to take all the information in the brick and mortar 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 that it creates experiences between the content and the user.
It's not a website just for Wal-Mart employees, Dranow added. It's a good resource for suppliers, business students, scholars, historians -- and even kids.
The hope is that people get immersed in the site's content and the layers that create Wal-Mart, its history, its founder and its people, de Leon said.
Though the website is all-encompassing, it can't replace the experience of a physical visit to the museum located on the downtown square, Dranow said.
Launching the website has been like launching another museum. It has to be updated and maintained, Dranow said.
Ideas for future additions include oral histories, more exhibits about different Wal-Mart divisions and translation of the website into other languages.
State Desk on 07/05/2015