Purpose

If you have a great idea for a museum exhibit and want to start a project to realize it, this How-To is for you.

Prerequisities

Mainly a good idea and a healthy dose of enthusiasm.  You can edit almost everything about a project later, so you don't have to have the definitive vision, but without a good solid idea to start with you are probably wasting your time.

Step by step

1. Click on the orange Projects tab, above, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and then on Create a Project.
2. Now you are asked to give your exhibit project a Title.  What you choose will - with a few modifications - become part of the URL (i.e. Web address) of your future project page, so it's wise to avoid strange characters (always good advice!).   I suggest you stick to letters, numbers, spaces and hyphens.  HINT: if you have a long title in mind and don't want a mile-long URL, you can give the project a short title first and then come back to put in the full title later.
3. Next, describe briefly the Big Idea behind your project.  Say just enough to interest a potential collaborator or reviewer, but spare the details for later.
4. For the Project Description, provide a few more sentences about how your project will work.  Don't worry about formatting the description because it will all appear as a single paragraph anyway.  Save extensive description, niggling details and questions you want to discuss for the project's wiki (see below).
   
5. Finally, you are asked for a project Image.  This needs to be in a format that Web browsers can recognize (GIF, JPEG or PNG) and should probably not be more that 600 pixels on a side.  If you don't have an image yet just skip this step and upload the image later.
6. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the Save button.
7. The last step is a bit silly.  It asks if you are ready to publish your project.  Just click "publish it" and move on.  Again, you can always come back and edit things later.

Congratulations, you have set up your project's home page!  You may want to bookmark the page so you can return to it directly or send it to potential collaborators (or to your Mom).

• the project workspace, a.k.a. the wiki
• project assets (images, Word files, spreadsheets, or any other relevant documents)
• the project's to-do list.
• a Help Wanted section (this is missing on projects created before April, 2008, but can be added to them).
  

Further information

Now that your project is set up, you need to think about

attracting collaborators, and

building a model of your project in Second Life.

For help with these next steps, see How to Manage an Exhibit Project.