Web Design for Museums and Galleries

We’re passionate about working with museums and we’ve developed a good understanding of the challenges many museums have appealing to a broad range of visitors, keeping ever-increasing numbers of digital channels up-to-date and encouraging donations and membership at a time when maintaining funding is challenging.

Our Approach

Whether we’re refreshing an existing website, creating something entirely new or helping you to digitise your archive we develop our websites through various stages and follow strong principles along the way:

we will always try to speak in a language you and your stakeholders understand and before any web design or web development takes place, we’ll want to hold stakeholder meetings to make sure everyone is, and feels, included in the project. We know that the ongoing success of your websites is dependent on the positivity the people in your organisation have towards it
we will always see your users and visitors as our major focus. Early on we will brainstorm and document a set of personas; a characterisation of the different web visitors you have and we’ll keep bringing you back to them
we work in partnership; a good website isn’t a one-hit delivered product but one which is born out of a well-worked out strategy, frequent review and support

Case Study for a Museum Website – The Holburne Museum

We worked with The Holburne Museum to create a new website which aimed to be the flagship of their brand, create stronger engagement for exhibitions across a wide demographic of users as well as allow them to sell their curated shop products online.

We began the process by exploring the wide cross-section of people who visit The Museum each year, as well as looking at those who visit less often and who we wanted to appeal to more. We also met with all the possible stakeholders we could within The Museum to explore their needs from a new website.

The Museum’s Information Architecture

The information architecture of a museum – essentially the various menus and categories a user navigates their way around a website – is essential to get right if we are to engage visitors well. To help decide the best way for this to work, we carry out an exercise called card-sorting. We site with members of the public, broadly representing the spread of a museum’s visitors, and let them devise a structure of pages for a website – literally using cards with text on. This gives us the best possible starting point for our design.

Web Design and Content

Design is an iterative process and we worked with The Holburne Museum through several rounds to produce a final design which we all felt represented the brand, while giving it space to evolve. We also worked with various stakeholders to train and consult on how to keep writing content to make sure the website stayed up-to-date and well-designed throughout. Final delivery of a website is always, for us, the beginning of a new phase rather than the end of a project and we continue to host, support and consult on engaging with The Museum’s visitors.