Creating an Innovative and Visually Compelling Website to Represent the V&A Online with the Squiz Suite
As one of the world’s largest and most prestigious cultural institutions, the V&A Museum needed an innovative new website to represent its collections online to a global audience. They selected Squiz Matrix to integrate a number of technologies and third party systems and to deliver the front-end presentation layer.
The new site boasts many technical innovations including an intuitive browsing experience which quickly guides visitors to the information they’re looking for, search powered dynamic content, community pages for user generated content and an integrated V&A Channel to deliver interviews and behind-the-scenes footage.
The museum’s internal web team manages the site. Richard Morgan, the Web Technical Manager, was responsible for managing the new website project. He managed the entire process from requirements gathering, through vendor selection to implementation.
The Challenge - Showcasing the Museum and its Collection
The core aim of the project was to replace the existing website to deliver significant improvements in three areas:
- The graphic design and user experience
- Showcasing the museum’s collections
- The capability of the underlying technology platform
The existing site design came across as functional rather than contemporary, and it failed to make use of the museum’s rich visual content. More importantly for visitors, the site was often difficult to navigate. Richard sums up the problem:
“The old site simply looked dated, it needed to be much more visual. The layout and organisation of the site was analogous to the physical layout of the museum. It may have made sense to our staff, but probably not to our visitors.”
A modern design was required to accurately reflect the institution and its collections. The site’s navigation, and organisation of content, also needed significant reworking to streamline the user journey and make information discovery more intuitive.
Secondly, the V&A ‘collections database’, a vast repository of information about each item in the museum’s collection, was not part of the online experience. Making this content available to visitors, in an easy to use and searchable manner, was a fundamental part of the website redesign project.
The existing website was hampered by an outdated CMS that was unable to meet these ambitious needs. The web team needed a powerful new system which could integrate with the collections database and other external systems, provide flexible front-end presentation capabilities and deliver a solid foundation for future development. The new system also needed to support a website that could evolve over time and allow the internal team to add new functionality without needing to go back to the original vendor.
It was decided that the site would be built using a number of different technologies. This would remove any dependence on a single provider and allow the team to use the best tools for each specific job within the site. To support these ambitions, the team needed a content management system that could easily integrate with other systems, whilst still providing a usable interface for non-technical staff. The V&A selected Squiz Matrix to provide this functionality.
The Solution - A Collaborative Partnership
Squiz Matrix has been deployed as the main content management system, and it delivers the front-end presentation layer of the website. A number of additional products are used to provide specific functionality on the site, such as indexing and presenting the collections database. These tools include Django, Drupal and Sphinx. Squiz Matrix acts as the connector between the otherwise disparate systems. Richard describes the system like this:
“Squiz Matrix is the glue between each of the other systems, it connects them together. In addition it stores a lot of the web content. The product offers excellent integration capabilities, and this was one of the key factors in its selection.”
The redesign and rebuild was carried out by the in-house team at the V&A with additional support and services as required from Squiz. Richard felt this way of working really benefited the team:
“Squiz showed us how best to implement what was required at every step along the way. ‘Co-location days’, where developers on all sides worked together, helped to bring our staff up to speed in the most effective way. This partnership element really made the project feel like a collaboration.”
The Result - An Innovative, Intuitive and Informative Website
The new website was launched in May 2011, and represents the single biggest online project for the V&A since the original site was created in the 1990s. It features a brand new look and feel and a raft of cutting edge functionality.
The new site offers an innovative organic browsing experience, making use of a dynamic navigation system that can adapt to new content as it is added. Users are able to easily search for and find content, both now and as the site grows. The new information architecture groups content much more intelligently then was previously possible, and even suggests related content the user might be interested in.
Since the site went live, Richard has had plenty of positive feedback:
“Our content editors love the new CMS, they really ‘get it’. Meanwhile, our developers love Squiz Matrix for its support of rapid agile development. But above all, the new site seems to be going down very well with our users, who are the most important stakeholders of all.”
The new site is a great success and a true online representation of the museum itself. V&A Director, Sir Mark Jones said:
“The V&A has spent the last 10 years creating beautiful and contemporary settings for its collections and restoring our buildings. We now have a website that reflects this transformation and is well-designed, compendious, intuitive and informative.”
