Client: Aratoi
Redesigning and upgrading a museum website
Aratoi, Wairarapa Museum of Art and History is one of the best regional art galleries
and museums in Aotearoa New Zealand and provides high quality experiences of art, history and
culture at its gallery in Masterton.
Anthea Birch has worked at Aratoi since 2009. In 2010,
Windush Design redesigned the original website and Anthea designed a new look for the site. Drupal was chosen to power the site. Drupal is a
powerful content management system making it easy for Aratoi staff to update the website.
Website redesign and upgrade
In 2019, an upgrade to Drupal 8 was combined with a redesign by Geoff
Francis. Geoff supplied mock-ups of the new design
which were used to create a custom Drupal theme.
Exhibition images
Geoff’s design required two different shaped images for each exhibition, an oblong one and a square
one (as pictured above). These are cropped and resized manually and uploaded to the website by
Aratoi staff. This means that staff have control over the composition of each image and the website
automatically displays the correct image (square or oblong), depending on the number of exhibitions
being displayed and the width of the user’s screen.
COVID-19 and virtual Aratoi
When the lockdown in March 2020, the gallery was closed and so Virtual Aratoi was developed. This was a quick and easy
process with Drupal.
Pro bono web hosting
As a contribution towards supporting Wairarapa arts and culture, Windrush Design provides reliable, NZ based web
hosting for free and some development work is done at a discounted rate.
