Project profile: Maine Maritime Museum
January 9th, 2012
Just a few short days ago Pemaquid launched a brand new Web site for the Maine Maritime Museum. The museum, located in Bath, Maine, is an extraordinary and fascinating tribute to Maine’s seafaring, shipbuilding heritage.
Maine Maritime has the largest collection of shipbuilding tools in the world, and has more than 20,000 items in its collection. It’s the only place in the world where you can tour a working U.S. naval shipyard, at the nearby Bath Iron Works. The world’s largest wooden ship, the six-masted schooner Wyoming, was built on what is now the museum grounds.
The Challenge
Maine Maritime asked Pemaquid to redesign its Web site because its old site was not doing a good job telling these stories and conveying the unique visitor experience one gets when touring the Museum’s exhibits and grounds (you can see the old site here). It was hard for people to find things, such as upcoming events and the exhibit curator’s posts, called Notes from the Orlop, and the online store was confusing and difficult to use.
It was so difficult for staff to use the site’s content management system that the site was difficult to use and very limiting as to what information the staff could control. A Flash-based slideshow on the home page didn’t work on iPhones and iPads, and the layout didn’t include linkages to social media points-of-presence.
We set to work to correct these problems.
The Solution
First, we wanted to create a look with visual impact. To connect with the museum’s visitor experience, we used an image of an old map from the museum archives as the background for the site “canvas”. We played off the angle of the nautical flag in the logo in several places. And we selected serif fonts for the page titles and navigation links that had the same character as that we’d seen in some of the exhibits.
Our next goal was to make sure people could find what they were looking for as well as create opportunities for them to bump into enticing features they may not have considered. While the old site had navigational links called “What To Do” and “Things To See”, items you might expect to find on a tourism site, we chose names like “Events”, Exhibits”, “Collection” and “Visit” to answer questions museum-goers would have. And unlike the old site, we made sure the navigation is precisely consistent on every single page.
Finally, for content management, we installed our Curator system, customized to Maine Maritime’s unique needs. The Curator is a collection of modules based on the Open Source Django platform. The Curator modules we installed for Maine Maritime include: Events, Exhibitions, Resources, Testimonials, Shop (for the e-store) and Pages. The modules allow museum staff to effortlessly update the site, add new pages and edit every section of the home page.
A site administrator can create other users and precisely control what parts of the site they can edit. For example, one user group can manage the e-store – updating products and checking on orders. Members of the curatorial staff can add exhibit information, while the folks in marketing and public relations can act as editors overseeing the entire content strategy.
The Curator content manager has led to an amazing transformation at Maine Maritime Museum. Staff members are using it all the time; some even find it fun to use. After a presentation in which staff gave it a test drive, a member of the curatorial staff, familiar with other more generic open source CMS’s, said, “This is better than WordPress!” (we love hearing things like that!).
The Strategy
We’re now working with the museum’s marketing communications department to fine-tune the site’s content strategy and use the Curator to post information that will encourage people to register for events, make donations, purchase items in the store and of course visit the museum itself.
We’ve seen immediate and incredibly (highly or very – incredibly seems a bit strong) positive results. In the first month since the new site launched, traffic has increased considerably: pageviews are up 52%, time-on-site is up more than 25% and pages-per-visit is up 25%.
Over the coming months we’ll continue to partner with Maine Maritime to develop a comprehensive online communications strategy to tie the museum’s Facebook page and Twitter feed with its enewsletters, blogs and events to engage members of the community, to spread the word about museum programs and exhibits and drive traffic to the site – and in the door.
