Nine venues, one website

Birmingham Museums Trust (BMT) is a charitable trust, caring for more than a million objects at nine venues across the city.

One of the biggest challenges when we started working with BMT to create their new web presence was deciding on the technical setup. Making sure it would be something that works both for the team, and their audiences.

With nine different venues, we needed to decide between creating nine individual websites – or just one.

One website vs. multiple

When an organisation manages multiple venues (or brands or products), there are decisions to be made when it comes to the online presence.

One approach would be to have a separate website for each venue (or brand or product).

In BMT's case, that would have meant nine venue websites – each managed through its own content management system (CMS).

The 'multiple websites' approach offers some benefits:

Each website can have a distinctive look and feel
As each website only needs to house a single venue, navigation can be simplified
Features can be specific to each venue’s needs
A separate domain per venue supports Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – users who build strong relationships with specific venues will likely search for that venue by name.

But there are downsides too:

Maintenance and support costs are likely to be higher – any updates need to be carried out across several websites instead of one
It’s more complex and time-consuming to cross-promote content and activities across separate websites – not to mention disruptive to the user journey
Repetition of content across multiple websites (e.g. each website may need an 'About us' page with the same content about BMT) makes it harder to manage
Losing a sense of the organisational brand – with users building strong relationships with specific venues, but not the larger organisation.

Considerations

Existing brand awareness, customer loyalty, and customer crossover – along with your organisational goals for each of these areas – should determine which route to go down.

For BMT, their new web presence needed to highlight the breadth of the Trust’s work, and be a place to share educational resources and stories from the city. It also needed to help them to make a case for support, and provide specific practical information to users about visiting each of their nine venues.

Added to all this, the web presence needed to be efficient, easy to manage and cost-effective, so that the small digital team at BMT could make the most out of it with limited resources.

Based on the needs of this project, we decided to build a single website to manage all nine venues.

Technical setup

The website is built using Craft CMS. It’s perfect for complex websites because it's lightweight, flexible, accessible, and easy to use. Another key benefit is the ability to easily and quickly create relationships across different sections of the website.

This enabled us to create one 'Entry' per venue within the CMS – with each Entry holding key information about one specific venue. More on that later!

The website uses a single domain, so each venue sits at birminghammuseums.org.uk. We needed to be sure that this wouldn't negatively impact SEO, or make it difficult for users to find the venue they're looking for.

Testing showed us that whilst there are some small impacts to SEO of using the same domain across venues, this wasn’t significant enough to justify managing multiple domains across the website.

A big bonus of using a single website across the nine venues is the ability to collate content from across the Trust, without the need for any double entry of content.

So, whilst each venue has its own “What’s on” listing, there’s also a central listing that collates all exhibitions and events from across the Trust to a single page.

Venue-specific information

From our Discovery sessions and workshops with the BMT team, we learned about each venue's quirks and uniquenesses.

There are large venues – for example, Thinktank which is open daily and charges admission. And smaller venues like Sarehole Mill which is open ad-hoc throughout the year, with grounds that are free to visit.

We found there were specific bits of information that needed to be recorded against each venue, such as:

Venue logo
Opening times
Admission information – including ticket prices
Social media channels

Some of this information could simply be added to individual web pages as content. For example, the BMT team could just type in the admission prices for Thinktank on the relevant Visit page. However, we were aware that some of this information would be repeated across the website and come up time and again.

Our solution was to create an Entry for each venue in the CMS.

This Entry could then be related to any event, exhibition, or page on the website. This means it acts as a central place to store and maintain key information about each venue. For the site administrators, this is great. It means, for example, that they only have to update opening times for Sarehole Mill in one place – and that information will be updated across all relevant pages.

This allows for a very streamlined approach to managing content – and ensures the most important information for users is easily kept up-to-date.

Important notices

Most websites we build have the concept of a site-wide notification – a means to clearly share important information with anyone visiting the website, and potentially coming to the venue. ("Closed due to snow" – that kind of thing.)

In BMT's case, however, it wouldn't be practical to show this kind of notification across the entire website. If Thinktank had to unexpectedly close early for example, we only need Thinktank visitors to see this information. That message isn’t relevant to users planning a visit to Aston Hall.

Plus, with nine venues, it’s possible there could be up to nine important messages to share at any one time! So each venue Entry can also store site-wide notifications that only appear on pages related to that venue:

Exhibitions and events

Across all of its venues, BMT programmes a huge range of very different exhibitions and events. For each of these, the BMT team can assign a venue. This does two things:

Displays any relevant branding and/or pricing information related to that venue.
Powers the event listings calendar. Across venues there’s a variety of opening times – the event listings calendar takes these into account, and shows exhibitions as either Available or not – based on the specific venue's opening times.

These features give users multiple routes to find exhibitions and events – whether it’s through the central listings page, a calendar view, or the individual venue listings pages.

A future-proof site

By combining neat features which streamline content management, with the flexibility to add and update information about individual venues means the BMT team can focus on the important things, rather than being bogged-down with fiddly website admin.

Birmingham Museums Trust now has a highly flexible and future-proof site.

To discuss your multi-venue website project with us, email me – kate@supercooldesign.co.uk