The Fan Museum

The existing site featured a wealth of useful information but suffered from a confusing structure and cumbersome navigation that was hiding it away. So an important first step in the project’s discovery phase was to carry out a content audit. This would inform our work on a new information architecture for the site, one that would help visitors quickly answer key visitor questions and put the most useful and interesting content right at their finger-tips.

An audit was also a good opportunity to improve the clarity of the content itself, balancing considerations of accessibility, personality and SEO to simplify without losing substance. A good example is the admission pricing. In the previous site this information was found on a separate page, which it filled. Condensing this key visitor information down to a form which comfortably sits in the side-column of every page puts the core pricing in easy reach of visitors. The full detail of concession and group entry options can still be revealed with a single click from any page in the site.

This approach taken across an entire site significantly improves the user experience and crucially reduces the number of enquiries the museum team have to field on a daily basis.

For conservation reasons it is not possible to display the entire fan collection together at one time. Like most museums a permanent display is complimented by a calendar of ever-changing exhibitions dedicated to a particular historical theme. But through an integration with the museum’s digital record system we were able to make the entire collection available to explore online. This is undoubtedly a great extra for general visitors but particularly useful for researchers and academics and The Fan Museum should really be applauded for embracing this open data approach.

The museum shop plays an important role in keeping this private collection open to the public and helping to fund future conservation work. In the previous site it had a small presence with a handful of publications and exhibition catalogues available to order. As part of our redevelopment we were able to expand this to over 100 products, moving the museum over to a much more fully-featured e-commerce platform (WooCommerce) and adding the extra security of SSL encryption.

A sizeable overseas audience who might never visit the museum in person still support it through donations and exhibition catalogue purchases. So the ability to automatically calculate the appropriate international shipping at checkout and other features, such as allowing regular shoppers to register for an express checkout on future purchases, have helped the new site to deliver a real return on investment.

We knew that we wanted to achieve a clean and simple design that wouldn’t stand in the way of the information, but still give a clear feeling of the museum’s atmosphere. The colour scheme centres on the museum’s rich brand red and we have extended the palette to a handful of complimentary tones. A crisp sans-serif font face, chosen for its legibility, is complimented by sparing use of a more stylised serif offering that lends a sense of heritage.

When it came to creating visual interest in the pages we let the fans do the talking. The images that sit at the tops of the pages are all fans from the museum’s vast collection. But they are more than just eye-candy and can be clicked on to reveal details about the particular fan in question and even link directly through to its digital record in the museum’s archive.

The results over the first 6 months have been extremely positive with a 60% increase in website visitors compared to the same period the previous year. Traffic from smartphones grew particularly strongly, the new Responsive design delivering a 180% growth in mobile visitors and 21% drop in the overall mobile bounce rate. Visitors in general are also more engaged with the average visit up by a whole minute.