The Eden Project
A visually stunning website for one of the UK's most important visitor attractions.
The Eden Project is a major tourist attraction, an educational charity, and a social enterprise. With a mission to demonstrate the power of collective action in protecting the planet, The Eden Project transformed a derelict clay pit into a living theatre of plants and people, featuring the world’s largest indoor rainforest. They wanted to bring their brand story to life and showcase living in harmony with nature through a highly engaging and visually stunning website.
Challenge
The Eden Project required a website that reflected their mission and conveyed the awe and wonder visitors experience when entering their world-famous biomes. They wanted to break down the silos present in their old website and ensure that every visitor was aware of Eden’s global mission while facilitating key user journeys, such as planning a visit or purchasing tickets. They also aimed to use the website as a platform for education, ecology, and community engagement.
Approach
We developed a completely new visual aesthetic that evolved the application of The Eden Project's brand identity to be more contemporary, more global, and more prestigious. Early design concepts were tested with users, and an evidence-based design approach was adopted to align user feedback with the creative strategy objectives of the client.
The website was built using the Drupal content management system to provide a modern, modular, and component-based editing experience for building pages. This choice was essential as the site needed to accommodate future growth and support The Eden Project’s ambitious global plans. The new digital toolkit is WCAG 2.1 accessible and device agnostic while offering rapid publishing capabilities within a visually appealing digital brand application.
Results
The launch of the new website marked a significant milestone in enhancing The Eden Project’s digital presence during a period of national and international growth. Their aim is to create a global movement that inspires people to make positive environmental changes and embrace citizenship of the planet over consumption.
The website provides a stunning, engaging, and welcoming digital space where visitors can be inspired to visit, learn, and have fun. It effectively communicates The Eden Project’s brand story, showcases sustainability, and facilitates key user journeys. The website serves as a thought leadership platform for convening discussions on ecology and sustainability, reinforcing The Eden Project’s position as a global leader in environmental initiatives.
The analytics data for the new website reveals some very impressive results too:
- The purchase of day and annual passes, memberships, and guidebooks increased by 17% within just 10 weeks of launch demonstrating the efficacy of the user journeys we designed and the payment systems we implemented.
- Page views increased by 21%, demonstrating significantly enhanced user engagement.
- Website sessions increased by 16%, demonstrating improved visibility and reach.
“Numiko have made us very happy. They have completely understood Eden as a destination and as a place in the heart. Their sumptuous interpretation of our journey feels biological and creaturely rather than mechanical, letting our culture speak. Beauty is life affirming and they have made Eden come alive."
“Our new website is a step-change for Eden, both visually and in how it represents our mission and values. We wanted to create an immersive, compelling and still welcoming digital presence, where we could showcase the very best of our physical sites and inspire our audiences across the world to join us in realising our vision. Numiko helped guide us on the journey, moving away from our previous destination focused website, to a site where our Mission is now interwoven through every visitor journey, whether they’re planning a visit or booking a ticket. At the same time, they have managed to capture the awe and wonder of our physical site, and bring this to life for our millions of virtual visitors.”