Planning Tips

In Omeka S, you build your sites page by page, using already existing resources on your installation. While it is best to have some resources before you start building out the pages, you can begin planning your site before you create the first item or item set.

What follows are some questions and ideas to help guide you as you plan your sites in Omeka S.

Site audience and goals

Who is the primary audience of this site? Being specific will help you shape the site; "people interested in historic architecture" is much more useful than "the general public." Do you have secondary audiences? What do you want these specific audiences to accomplish when they come to the site?

What are the goals of your site? What do you want your specific audiences to accomplish when they come to the site? What do you want people to take away from the site? What content do you want to highlight?

Resources

What will you do with items in this website? Items are the building blocks of Omeka S. What sort of resource templates will you want to create and use to fully describe your items? Any item you include on an Omeka S will have a public item show page, so try to ensure that the information in an item's metadata can stand on its own.

What will you do with item sets? You can use item sets to group items to be included on a site, and they can be a way to guide visitors' browsing on your sites. For some sites, item sets are robust resources themselves.

How do you want to group items into sets? What metadata fields will your item sets use? Do your item sets have relations to each other or to items?

What do you want your data to do? What properties are you going to want to consistently describe in your site? Do you want some of these to display with a different label - for example 'author' instead of 'creator' for books? Use a resource template and change the label of the property.

In Omeka S, items and item sets can use other resources - items, item sets, and media - as properties; for example, you can make an item for William Shakespeare and have that item fill the 'creator' property for a 'Hamlet' item. How can your resources use this functionality?

Do you want to use a set of terms (controlled vocabulary) for certain items? You might want to use Custom Vocab. Or do you want to use a terms list created by the Library of Congress or the Getty? Then you might use Vocab Suggest.

Building a site

With Omeka S you will build your site from the ground up, which means you need to give some thought to how you want to organize your site.

What pages do you want to include? What kind of content do you want on these pages? How do you want to arrange them? Try sketching out a sample menu or wireframes for the site. Use that as a guide as you build your pages.

Pages are made up of blocks, which can include text, images, and much more. What kind of content do you want on the pages you build? Bear in mind that you can rearrange page blocks as you build, so you can play around with the order of the content on your pages if you need to.

How do you want to interact with your visitors on your site? Do you want to collect resources from your visitors? Allow them to share your content on social media?

Will you require users to create accounts on your site? Familiarize yourself with user roles and permissions.