Sector(s)
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.
About the project
Context
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
The results showed that international traffic increased by 27%, demonstrating the ability for the new website to attract users from around the world. Additionally, new users visiting the site via Google search increased by 13%, demonstrating the efficacy of the search engine optimisation we put in place.
Why Drupal was chosen
We selected Drupal for this project because it gives the British Museum's web team genuine control over the website without locking them into rigid templates or requiring constant developer support. Its modular approach means editors can build and adapt pages using flexible building blocks, responding to new needs as they arise while keeping the site's design consistent. The modern editing experience — with intuitive tools like CKEditor 5 and the clean Gin admin interface — makes content management straightforward, even for non-technical users. Drupal's granular permission controls allow precise management of who can do what across the team, which is essential for organisations with complex governance needs. Security is robust, backed by a community of over 118,000 active developers who continuously work on access control, encryption, and protection against attacks. And because Drupal scales effortlessly to handle millions of visitors and tens of thousands of pages, this project's website can grow with the organisation — without the hefty licensing fees of enterprise alternatives.
Technical Specifications
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