I recently completed a comprehensive redesign of the Burke Museum website, burkemuseum.org. The website has nearly 1 million visitors each year and boasts a wide range of content—from museum visit-related information to educational content like Spider Myths.
Over the past year, I served as the Burke’s website redesign project manager and handled everything from creating the content strategy and site architecture, leading meetings with teams of internal stakeholders, managing the budget, writing content, gathering images, and building out the more than 1,100 pages.
I’m incredibly proud of the Burke’s new website: burkemuseum.org. Check it out!
Here are a few of the key goals the new website needed to accomplish:
- Introduce the new museum: Our website would need to be welcoming, exciting and modern like the new building, while also showing the active, ever-changing nature of the new inside-out museum where researchers are working in labs alongside galleries. Part of our strategy is to dynamically pull in #TheBurkeAtWork feed from our Instagram throughout our website to show highlights of what’s happening on any given day to encourage visitors to come and to show the value of a membership.
- Introduce online timed ticketing and membership purchases: We needed a way to sell timed tickets online to help speed up check in and spread out visitors throughout the day. I worked with our Visitor Experience and Membership teams, along with our developer Bear Group, to create a system for timed ticketing that also helps up-sell memberships and pulls in our events calendar so people can see what’s happening on the day/time they want to visit. >> View Tickets
- Elevate storytelling content: A major focus of our website is storytelling and sharing Burke researcher’s expertise. We have visitors come to our site from all over the world to learn about things like spider myths, frogs, birthstones, geologic history, Native art, and more. I’ve partnered with Burke researchers to create engaging and informative content, so it was important that we have a platform that makes this content discoverable throughout the site. >> View News & Stories
- Make the website easy to use and manage: This is the one that makes me happiest each day! Our new website isn’t just easier for visitors to use, but it is incredibly easy for me, and the rest of our communications team, to create, edit, and manage.
Burke Museum website project partners:
- Design: Fell Swoop
- Development: Bear Group
Cathy Morris 