Brooklands Museum
The Challenge
The old Brooklands Museum website was nearly ten years old and doing little to excite website users and convert them to museum visitors.
The new website needed a complete change to the site architecture, images and updates to the branding. It was essential that the new website allows visitors to learn about Brooklands and start discovering all the amazing exhibits and events taking place at the museum.
We won our pitch and got the task of making the clients vision come alive.
Our Approach
We worked closely with our friends at Premm Design to deliver a website that not only looks amazing, but is easy to navigate and clearly presents a wealth of content and imagery about the amazing Brooklands Museum.
During a series of meetings with the Marketing team at Brooklands Museum, we explored the different audiences that the museum website needed to work for and what they would want to do on the website. These included, different ages and other various demographics. With this in mind, we planned an entire new website, exploring the architecture via a series of sitemaps. When the site was built, we added 301 redirects to ensure that old URL's go to their new pages.
Brooklands Museum is host to amazing buildings, vehicles, objects and events. On the new website we wanted to create a "window" into this amazing historical world and give visitors an immediate impression of how informative, fun and exciting visiting Brooklands Museum will be for them.
A new colour scheme was introduced to differentiate the different sections, (such as Museum, Concorde, Shop and Members) but maintains the Museum brand across the whole site. We built an interactive map of the site so that visitors can discover what they want to view when they visit and get familiar with the museum in advance.
ConcreteCMS has been used as the platform and gives museum staff a cutting-edge system that enables them to easily make changes as they view the site and provides the flexibility to update their content with nearly no input from us. This was really important to Brooklands Museum because they wanted to be as self-sufficient as possible with the daily running of the website.
Our High Performance web hosting with Litespeed cache means the site has very fast page loading times. Since going live, the website has resulted in an increase in traffic with a decreased bounce rate. Thanks to a cutting edge platform and excellent hosting set up, the site runs smoothly, reaching over 8,000 visitors a day*.
Over the last 8+ years, we have supported Brooklands Museum, helping them to transition technically during staff changes, develop new functionality, launch new events and roll out a rebrand across the website in 2021.
* Peak daily traffic figure as measured in Google Analytics
Results
The project has been a huge success in the following ways...
- Bounce rate reduced by >20%
- Flexible CMS, easy to make website changes in-house
- Pages/Session increased by >25%
- Redesign based on existing site, going strong after 5+ years
95+
Happy clients150+
Websites in our care9+
Years trading94%
Client retention
Due to business expansion I needed to make some amendments to a existing WordPress website. I asked Made Simple Media for some suggestions on the ideas I had and he was super helpful and came up with some great ideas to make the website perform and navigate better. Him and his team then did a great job in putting the ideas to practice and I was kept informed as the work was underway. Highly recommend Dave and his team!
Matthew Naylor, The Performance Zone
Having never had the responsibility of creating a new website for the business before, Made Simple Media could not have made it a more easier and pleasurable experience. From the initial meeting to the end product, we could not have been happier. Made Simple Media quickly grasped what we were looking to achieve in both design style and function.
Tanya
I am Chief Executive of a charity. When I took over our website crashed and we lost all our data. We switched hosts to Made Simple Media, took on a brand new CMS and we have never looked back. Dave was fantastic then and remains so. Always approachable, quick to respond and great tools to help you on your way.
Matthew Sykes, Sir Simon Milton Foundation
We are delighted with the quality of our new website, which has enabled us to effectively communicate our various areas of work and build an engaged and increasingly active audience. The common-sense design and easy-to-navigate structure has also helped us establish our organisational identity following a full rebrand in 2017. The support has been excellent throughout.
Jack Dixon, Imperial Health Charity
Made Simple Media have made a number of websites for us and their work is always of a high standard. They are fast acting when we need help and I would happily recommend Made Simple Media to anyone looking for web development help.
Chris, Respirex International
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