Does this still fit?

Ever go to a shoe store, try on a pair of shoes and think, “Wow, these are great”? Ever wear those same shoes around town for a bit and realize that they are actually too tight?

After wearing them for a year or so, we’ve decided that the Digital Collections home page and individual collection home pages are just too tight — we want to squeeze more great stuff into the current designs than they will comfortably hold.

The challenge?

We want the standard introductory text, contact information, navigation, copyright and usage info as before — but we want so much more:

Cooliris galleries

YouTube videos

Term clouds

RSS feeds of recent comments (oh, wait, we don’t have a commenting system)

RSS feeds of other stuff (since we don’t have a commenting system)

Interactive widgets (Simile Timeline anyone?)

Mashups (Data, meet Google maps. Google maps, meet data.)

Yes, we have Web 2.0 on the brain. Maybe this will pass. Until then, we will re-think a variety of pages with greater content flexibility in mind.

Stay tuned…