The Museum's plumbing...

Research work started nearly seven years before writing commenced on the original version of the Museum.  Archive documents from the store-based Company (that are now held by Shop Direct Group), including hand-written minutes of the store chain's first Board Meetings in 1909, provided some pointers, but much more was needed.

To supplement the limited Company resources an extensive search revealed a wealth of material in libraries, at auction and in the private collections of family members of the original pioneers of Woolworths on both sides of the Atlantic. It became clear that in days gone by Woolworths had a strong sense of tradition, and many colleagues past and present had collected staff magazines, press stories, albums of photographs and fond memories - in some cases spanning several generations from the same family, right back to the Great War.

Woolworths' people proved conclusively that while much of the heritage had been abandonned by the latter day management, the core value of "pride in the brand" remained alive and well, but needed to be documented and preserved for posterity.

Like the store chain, the Museum is an ecletic mix. It tries to make sense of thousands of documents and photographs, and to share multimedia items like films and gramophone records, using state-of-the-art computing and a broad spectrum of techniques to digitize content, capture and optimize the output. Meticulous care has been taken from winding the 1910s gramophone to loading the digital audio tapes to applying the sound filters on a Core i7 quad-core 12GHz PC, or sharpening and remastering the images.

The original version of the Museum was published in 2004, with the store based company making space for it as part of their on-line offering. Over a four year period it served more than two million pages, with a further million served in the week that the chain collapsed into Administration. The site spawned a BBC television documentary (screened on BBC2 and repeated many times on BBC4) and a special on BBC Radio Two, and has also featured on BBC television's Panorama, ITN News at Ten and in media coverage around the world, and was nominated as a 'National Treasure'.

Public interest in the site prompted many enquiries and offers of information, with work starting in 2005 on an enlarged version which was intended to mark the 100th Anniversary of the Store Chain as a going concern. Sadly this was overtaken by events, which only serve to highlight the need for a permanent memorial to the much-loved and much-missed High Street stores.

The screen layout and design has evolved since work first started, prompted partly by the rapid advances in Adobe's software as Macromedia Studio 8 became Dreamweaver and Photoshop grew into Creative Suite. All five versions have been used to produce the new version.

The original goal was to strike a balance between visual appeal and downloading time, and making it easy to navigate around the site, dip in, or search for specifics. At the time most home visitors had to rely on slow dial-up connections to the Internet which offered only limited bandwidth. Since then much has changed. The widespread take-up of broadband and the emergence of standards for video on demand mean that today it is possible to offer a richer experience. The new screens are larger and the pictures are displayed in higher resolution. The multimedia offering has been enhanced by the use of a number of new technologies, including Adobe Flash Professional, Spry and Ajax, while the site also includes its own search engine.

The site is effectively a showcase for Adobe CS5 Master Collection, with virtually all of the applications used in one area or another. The pages were prepared in Dreamweaver, with animations from Fireworks, picture processing in Photoshop Extended and Adobe Bridge and video content from Premiere, After Effects and interactive content built with Encore, Flash Professional, Audition (CS) and Soundbooth (CS5). Some content was also prepared in CorelDraw Graphics Suite X4 and in Apple Quicktime.

There is a little JavaScript here and there and there are a few Active-X controls, most notably to allow volume controls for embedded sound in some pages. The search facility uses 'Zoom' which the Original Virtual Museum has licenced from Wrensoft. There is also music licenced from Jack Waldenmaier Productions (The Music Bakery). The site does not use cookies.

Audio for our Virtual Jukeboxes and Video for the Virtual Cinema and interactive quiz provided a particular challenge. We experimented with a number of technologies and formats to try to give the most faithful reproduction in the narrowest bandwidth, settling for a mix of MP3, WAV and AIFF audio and principally for F4V formatted Flash Video.

Most of the images on the site are presented at 96 dots per inch and have only limited compression to maximise the picture quality.

The site has been tested with Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome and adapted to suit the nuances of each of these browsers. We cannot promise perfection, but have done our best.

The woolworthsmuseum.co.uk site is hosted by 1&1 Internet AG on a green Unix Platform.

We hope you enjoy your visit to our Virtual Museum and find what you're looking for.  If you have feedback or ideas about how the site could be improved, you're welcome to drop us a line, or click this link to visit our feedback information page.

Shortcuts to other 'about this website' exhibits
in the Original Virtual Museum

Woolworths history overview   The Woolworths timeline   Woolworths bibliography

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