Sector(s)
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.
About the project
Context
The Eden Project required a website that reflected their mission and conveyed the awe and wonder visitors experience when entering their world-famous biomes.
Challenge
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.
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. It also 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.
Results
Website sessions increased by 41%, demonstrating improved visibility and reach. Additionally, 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.
Why Drupal was chosen
We selected Drupal for this project because it gives The Eden Project'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
Drupal version:
