Carson House Museum Website
A full scale WordPress redesign and development project for the Historic Carson House Museum in Western North Carolina. The site blends historical storytelling with event management and modern usability, giving staff a flexible content system and visitors a clear path to explore the museum’s history, events, and venue offerings.
Technologies Used
- Wordpress
- PHP
- SCSS
- Javascript
- Pantheon
- Lando
Project Details
Client Background
The Historic Carson House is one of the oldest standing structures in Western North Carolina and serves as a museum, archival center, and community event venue. The organization needed a modern, mobile friendly website that could support historical content, staff updates, event listings, and visitor information in an intuitive and flexible way.
Project Context
This project was delivered by the Interactive Knowledge development team as a custom WordPress build hosted on Pantheon. The goal was to create a visually rich site with strong historical identity while making content management simple for non technical museum staff. The work included custom theme development, responsive layout design, content architecture, and feature builds tailored to museum operations.
My Role and Contributions
I contributed across both the front end and back end of the site, focusing on:
• Custom WordPress theme development using PHP templates and modular SCSS
• Building custom post types and taxonomies for events, slideshows, staff, and stories
• Creating the homepage hero slideshow with content managed fields and responsive images
• Developing the staff and board directory with custom sorting and role filters
• Building the events calendar system with date parsing and upcoming event logic
• Styling and layout refinements across pages, templates, and custom components
• Implementing accessibility improvements including semantic structure and external link handling
• Supporting Pantheon deployments and QA across dev, test, and live environments
My work helped shape the core features that the client uses daily, ensuring the site is stable, accessible, and easy for the museum staff to update.
Key Features
• Custom hero slideshow with content managed slides
• Events system with custom fields and date based sorting
• Staff and board directory with alphabetical filtering
• Mobile first navigation and responsive layout• WordPress Customizer controls for museum hours and key site content• Content managed footer with dynamic policies and contact info• External link indicators and accessibility improvements