Building an exciting, unified online experience

Consisting of the Royal Observatory, the Cutty Sark, National Maritime Museum and the Queen’s House, Royal Museums Greenwich (RMG) boasts some of the UK's most iconic tourist attractions.

Devoted to enriching people’s understanding of the sea, the exploration of space, and Britain's role in world history, RMG attracts millions of domestic and international visitors each year.

Challenge

Royal Museums Greenwich had multiple interconnected sites on their CMS platform, which was preventing them from maintaining their website efficiently, and providing an unintuitive experience for their users.

As the Drupal 7 end-of-life approached in November 2022, this was the perfect opportunity for RMG to both update their CMS and reimagine their digital offer.

They needed to connect a vast selection of isolated content pieces as well as integrate collections, libraries and archives into a single cohesive website that would:

• Inspire people to visit
• Get visitors to explore and engage with collections, stories and topics
• Grow income generation
• Be flexible and sustainable

Solution

As Drupal specialists with over 14 years of experience and proven success with bringing large museum groups and vast collections online, manifesto was commissioned to undertake the RMG site development project.

We carried out a series of discovery workshops, user surveys and interviews to define the following 4 design objectives:

1. Clear offer, site structure and information
2. Reflect the epic adventures, and spark curiosity
3. Integrate stories, visitors and objects
4. Create editorial flexibility and visible diversity

From this we created the overall proposition "Excite and Inspire" for RMG, with a design direction which would be bold yet friendly, dynamic yet clear.

The new design brings the website back in line with RMG's brand. Where the old site used a safe but unexciting white background, our design team adopted the "dark battleship" theme used by RMG offline as the backdrop for stunning visual imagery. In reference to the Prime Meridian of the World, the home of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, we also used a vertical line to bind together the different elements on the page.

In the second release, RMG launched their new online collection. Previously separate collection, archive and library sites were integrated into the main site with a simplified filtering, search and browsing experience, giving researchers and members of the general public access to the museum's extensive resources.

Impact 

• Newsletter sign ups increased by 100% in the first 2 weeks
• Bounce rates, session duration, and pages/session all improved between 3% – 5%

Just as importantly, the improved CMS now enables editorial teams to create and edit pages with ease. This has allowed RMG to move to a multi-user approach with pages being produced and published without the need to run through a centralised team.