Last week I visited the new Great North Museum : Hancock in Newcastle for the first time, partly to quell my intrigue about this exciting new venue, but mostly as a new outing for my two sons. We started in the Mouse House, a room designed for exploration by the under fives. There were various things for children to look into – behind flaps, in a piece of climbable ‘cheese’ and on a giant table. There were plenty of children in and out of the room and it kept them entertained for a good stretch of time. However, I found it strange that none of the objects in the room had labels on. I assume that this is a strategic decision to allow children to feel free to explore and to emphasise that it is a fun area not a learning one.

However, it seemed like a missed opportunity to me. The labels could easily have been placed to the side or under more flaps or exploratory gadgets for those keen to find them. These could be ignored by children not interested in the detail but would avoid the stream of parents having to guess. It would also actually have been nice to have some extra information for parents – a chance to read about a stoat/otter/thingy whilst waiting for your children to have their fill of the giant padded cheese.

This is an issue often faced by museums when preparing content for their websites – how to distill sometimes vast and indepth information for their different audiences, from academics to lazy socials. The answer is in well-designed layers of content and the internet is the ideal medium for it. With full use of headings, sub-headings, quotes, reveals, downloads, captions and various kinds of links (jump links, further information, related links etc.) users should be able to directly find all the information they want and no more.

A client recently asked us how they could manage all the myriad pages of their website now that they needed content for each of their audiences. Our suggestion was to simplify the site to only one page on each topic, not one page per audience per topic, and to colour-code areas within each page for the content to suit each audience. This would not only make the site clearer for users and editors, but also allowed for users and editors, but also allowed for users who were a combination of audiences types – ’skimmers’ in relation to some topics, and ’swimmers’ for others. We also helped them plan navigational routes through the site, either horizontally – an overview of everything or an in-depth view of everything – or vertically – a logical path through one topic – with links to change direction at each step.

Following this approach should mean that you don’t lose any visitors as a result of a lack of information: ‘There’s an event on but I don’t really understand what it’s about’ or the reverse: ‘I couldn’t be bothered to wade through it all’. And hopefully you won’t give any parents like me the underwhelmed inferior feeling: ‘Erm, it’s a rodent of some kind. Look there’s a dinosaur!’