Homepage Design Advice for Omeka Novice

Hi there!

I’m an undergraduate student preparing a website for a faculty member that wants to share his research on a 20th century architect (so my items include many buildings plans and photographs). I’m pretty new to Omeka (started exploring back in mid-February), and I am not really familiar with the ins-and-outs of HTML and CSS language (though it seems many on this forum do, so I hope I’m not overreaching here).

I’m hoping someone out there can help me out with the design aspect of Omeka. After looking at many showcase sites, the faculty member I’m working with really wants to emulate the layout of the Histories of the National Mall homepage http://mallhistory.org. The idea is that on the homepage the user can choose one of the four sites that the architect traveled to in his lifetime (i.e. instead of “exploration, people, maps, and past events,” it would be labeled as the four locations central to the architect’s biography).

In sum, can someone please share with me how to go about making a homepage similar to that of the Histories of the National Mall site? I implemented the Big Picture Theme, as it appears that’s what the Histories of the National Mall uses, but what I want to do seems to go beyond the Theme. That’s the overarching issue I’m having: implementing design using the tools that Omeka offers is fairly limited to a novice like myself.

I would greatly appreciate any feedback on this problem!

Histories of the National Mall uses a custom theme, which you would not be able to simply port over to a new project because of some of the customization for that project in particular (for example, the map browse is highly customized).

To create or modify themes for Omeka beyond the basic options in the settings, you need HTML, CSS, and PHP. There are is some basic information in the developer documentation for modifying existing themes. You may need to seek out tutorials on php elsewhere on the web for this to work.

And of course posting on the forum for specific things you’re trying to achieve or questions about hooks and functions.