Web: Redesign of ToledoMuseum.org
September 2016-March 2018
The Challenge: The Toledo Museum of Art’s website, ToledoMuseum.org, was long overdue for a redesign. The needs of the Museum had outgrown its current content management system, WordPress. The website’s content also needed a thorough review due to an assortment of separate microsites, other web-based systems used by the Museum and a site map that contained hundreds of pages. The end goal was to launch a redesigned ToledoMuseum.org that:
Allowed for the easy creation of visually engaging pages
Provided visitors a single point-of-sale experience
Incorporated the Museum’s collection in the overall site search
Collected visitor data, like email addresses, for targeted marketing
The Solution: A cross-departmental website redesign team was created and after the RFP process, the Museum awarded the project to Interactive Knowledge, a digital experience agency that works exclusively with cultural, educational and public institutions. I was selected as the project manager on the website redesign team, which required that I work closely with the website redesign team, Museum stakeholders and the developers at Interactive Knowledge.
During the website design discovery phase, it was decided that the new website would be built on Drupal, an open-source content management system (CMS), and that the single point-of-sale experience would be powered by two software systems that seamlessly connected online and onsite sales: Outbound and NCR Counterpoint.
The Result: The new ToledoMuseum.org launched in March 2018 and was completed on time and on budget.
Visitors were spending more time on the site and viewing more pages not long after the new website launched. There was no need to create separate microsites anymore; the various content types and content blocks within the Drupal CMS made creating engaging and meaningful pages easy to accomplish.
The single point-of-sale experience allowed the Museum to collect more visitor data, which led to subsequent campaigns to increase membership and grew TMA’s email list by thousands of subscribers within a year of the website’s launch.
While successfully managing this complicated, 18-month website redesign project from discovery to launch, I was promoted to Marketing Communications Manager in 2017.