The British Museum has a collection of over eight million artefacts and welcomes six million visitors each year. We created a new website to grow their audience and support their exceptional digital collection.
Challenge
The British Museum needed a new website to enhance their user experience, creating an engaging digital platform that resonated with their offline identity, and presenting their vast collection in an organised, accessible, and intriguing way. The previous website failed to handle the influx of online visitors, resulting in reduced engagement and potential losses in online donations and patronage. This is a challenge we have addressed for various other clients, including the Science Museum Group, drawing upon our extensive experience in digital transformation projects for museums and cultural institutions.
Approach
We embarked on this project with a technical overhaul that included the introduction of our in-house Drupal Install Profile. This system enabled us to work efficiently and cost-effectively, delivering an exemplary website at about a third of the cost of other competitive tenders. We also focused on design and branding, striving to extend the museum's distinct brand identity into the digital realm. This involved a thorough design prototyping process that led to the creation of a flexible, component-based solution, successfully balancing imagery and information.
In collaboration with the British Museum, we conducted rigorous testing and validation to ensure the new website was user-friendly, engaging, and aligned with the museum’s aspirations.
Bringing the Bayeux Tapestry online
Since launching the new website, we’ve continued to help the British Museum reach more people online. When the Bayeux Tapestry returned to England for the first time in nearly a thousand years, tickets were in high demand, and not everyone could make the trip. The Museum asked us to design and build an interactive online experience, so people could explore it, wherever they are.
The first challenge was scale. The source image of the Tapestry is around 2.7 billion pixels in total, so we turned it into a fast deep-zoom tile set, served through the Museum's own image infrastructure, so users can pan across the full 70 metres and zoom in to individual stitches on any device.
More than 240 hotspots are grouped into seven themes; People, Places, Daily life, Design & making, Latin, Warfare & power, and Animals & nature. People can filter by theme to follow a single thread, and a timeline covering all 58 scenes and 13 sections makes it easy to navigate the whole work without getting lost along the way.
To ensure everyone can access and use it, we built accessibility in from the start. The experience meets WCAG 2.2 AA, works by keyboard throughout and includes written scene descriptions for screen reader users. The result is a free learning resource for schools, learners and the wider public, available long after the Tapestry's ten-month stay ends.
Results
Results
87%
Growth in monthly users.
79%
Increase in international users, highlighting increased international reach.
What the client says
“Working with Numiko has been as much a partnership as a client-supplier relationship. They were proactive in suggesting solutions to tricky problems and in handling our internal stakeholders successfully. The resulting website, launched on time and to budget, definitely meets our key words of “Welcoming, elegant, dynamic and authoritative”, and has been extremely well received by visitors, stakeholders and the wider museum staff and our peers.”