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.
Results
27%
International traffic has increased by 27% demonstrating the ability for the new website to attract users from around the world.
13%
New users visiting the site via Google search has increased by 13% demonstrating the efficacy of the search engine optimisation we put in place.
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.”