Along with the rest of the world, my usual day-to-day life changed dramatically in mid-March. The kids started distance learning, and I began working from home full time. Now, I’ve worked from home (WFH) at least part time since 2013, so it wasn’t completely new to me. Distance learning on the other hand…. notsomuch! But that’s for another post entirely….
When I first became the Director of Marketing for the Children’s Museum of Southern Minnesota, rebuilding the website was my number one priority (of a longgggg list of priorities, I might add!). As I am sure many of you can relate to, that priority got pushed to the back burner as I dealt with managing all the day-to-day responsibilities that come with a Children’s Museum that has, you know, visitors!
In the era of social distancing however, I was able to focus much more of my time on rebuilding the website. This was no small task by any means. The site at the time was original to when the Museum opened many years before. It was not intuitive, flexible, and most importantly it was missing a lot of important information and features.
Here’s a look at the “before”:
Tiles, accordions, way too many colors, unresponsive, and just in desperate need of an overall in general. So I went to work! (Insert my excited happy dance here.)
Step One: Research
My very first step was conducting a lot of SEO research to make sure our target audience was able to find us. This meant digging into our Google Analytics and spending a lot of time within many SEO tools (Keywords Everywhere and MOZ were my faves).
From there, I had to determine how to best lay out the site and what features it needed. I looked at a lot of other Children’s Museum’s websites and took note of what I felt worked, what didn’t, and what could be adopted by our new website. Bonus: during this process, I found a lot of other initiatives (not-website related) that I wanted to adopt at CMSM too! Drawback: my priority list grew exponentially ????. Oh, what it is to be a marketer!
Another significant part of research was determining what information did not need to be transferred to the new website, and what vital information was missing. From there, it was a matter of choosing a theme, a page builder, and working with our amazing web developer, PresenceMaker to help us set a staging site and answer all the super technical aspects I’m still learning.
Step Two: The Build
Based on my research, I started laying out the website wireframe. This being a more comprehensive website, I knew there’d be modifications along the way and that’s okay. After all, having flexibility in the new site was a priority, so I had to be flexible too!
Once I was able to dedicate a good chunk of time to the rebuild, it actually came together quite nicely. Luckily, the Museum has an extensive library of photos to pull from thanks to an on-site Marketing Manager with some mad photography skills (Ines, you’re a gem!). That made including updated and beautiful photography super easy. A lot of basic information about the Museum was simply edited or expanded on, making the copywriting pretty straightforward as well.
The exceptions to these aspects were the exhibits themselves and information about our staff and board. The Museum’s Director of Environments and Experiences (aka the exhibits powerhouse, Deb) provided the content for the exhibit pages. I know it was a lot of work pulling that information together, but in the end it was totally worth it and really shows the thought that goes into every. single. thing. on the Museum floor. It might look like just a child playing to you…. but trust me SO MUCH MORE is going on with every experience!
Step Three: The Launch
Once I had every page built to my liking, I sent the staging site out to CMSM staff and a few friends (…or a very supportive husband) for feedback and to hopefully catch any errors/missing links. Thankfully there wasn’t much of that and we were ready for launch day!
We did have a couple of minor hiccups when transferring over, but nothing that I hadn’t anticipated and therefore they were relatively easy to manage. I had to rebuild two of the pages that lost formatting in the transition (I believe due to an inactive plugin issue), add a handful of redirects to fix broken links, and that was it!
Hello, beautiful new website!!
Step Four: Monitor and Analyze
Being the nerdy marketer that I am, I couldn’t wait to dig into analyzing the effects of the new website. Of course, this is further complicated by the fact that we launched during a pandemic, when the Museum is closed and everyone is asked to stay home. Because of this, I cannot fairly compare year-over-year data. I mean, just by nature far less people are going to be searching for us, but that doesn’t mean it was all for naught.
For example, once we shut our doors to the public, CMSM Museum Educators got to work developing activities for kids and families to do at home. Dubbed #CMSMatHome, this was one of those “unexpected” areas of the website I had not anticipated building. But during the pandemic, it became the most visited area of the website! Not surprising, but it did give our stats a nice boost and it keeps our name out there while we can’t have on-site visitors.
I look forward to closely monitoring these analytics over the next several months and especially as we begin to open things back up. When that time comes, it’ll be more imperative than over to have a functional website that communicates all the changes families must be made aware of before visiting us again.
Take a look for yourself! I’d love to hear what you think of it.
Onto the next project…
