The Black Country Living Museum is an open-air museum of historic buildings in the heart of the Black Country, welcoming over 350,000 visitors every year.
As one of the area’s most popular destinations, the museum approached VBX to help them improve the user experience on their website – most visitors’ first port of call – by redeveloping the design and integrating a new ticketing system.
During our Define phase, we explored the user journey in more detail to determine any barriers to engagement. Their existing platform and site design featured a confusing navigational structure, while their team found the outdated Content Management system difficult to update internally.
The system also presented a challenge for effective SEO, which meant they were missing out on key search traffic, and there was limited integration with their popular social media channels.
By understanding the museum’s audience mosaics and evaluating their online journey, we identified a new platform which addressed these barriers.
Upgrading their Content Management System to WordPress instantly enabled a number of key site improvements, including the use of an intuitive drag and drop builder, improved on-page and on-site SEO capability and increased social sharing options. Improved functionality was complemented by work from our creative team to ensure the design was clear, on-brand and aesthetically pleasing.
Since the website relaunched, there’s been a sustained increase of over 40% in unique users visiting the museum’s key pages, including the visitor information, what’s on and membership sections.
