The American Museum in Britain
Website and strategic digital support
We’ve had the huge pleasure to be involved with the team at the American Museum in Britain working on a new website for them. Not only does this museum have collections and an exhibition programme to die for it also has the most beautiful views and gardens, and the best home-made cookies in the cafe! If you haven't been to the American Museum, you really, really must go.
The new site is a beautiful, clean, responsive design – all built on top of WordPress.
We’ve implemented a some new things we’re quite proud of on this build, including:
> A fully modular content system, built from the ground up and using standard WordPress technology – but it’s a system which allows any page to be featured anywhere on the site, whether on-page or in the sidebar. It’s the whole “write once, surface many” vision which is common in bigger CMS systems but not as often used in WordPress.
> A custom event calendar which integrates fully with the whole user-friendly WordPress experience
> A “first phase” online objects system which has allowed the team to add 50 or so “favourite objects”. The tech here is good – but the objects themselves are absolutely stunning. Have a look at the gallery page and try clicking through to a few of the detail pages. Lovely! In the future, we’re hoping to work with the museum’s existing in-house collections management system and get more objects online..
> Responsiveness – we mentioned this already, but it’s increasingly important that the site works well on different devices. So far we’re seeing around 30% traffic from mobile, which is pretty high. It’s only going to get higher in the future though so we’ve made the decision at Thirty8 Digital to create all sites from here on up using a responsive approach.
We should also mention that core to this whole relaunch has been a flexible, open and responsive team up at the museum. They’ve been brilliant providing us with huge amounts of content and images, and have settled very quickly into the ways of using Google Docs and other tools like Trello to help coordinate the project.