McLean County Museum of History

Visit

Reimagining an AAM-accredited history museum's website on a new CMS platform.

Project Role

UI / UX & Development

Timeline

6 months

Team

One designer / developer, one project manager, stakeholders from all museum departments.

Table of Contents

Background

McLean County Museum of History is an AAM-accredited museum that outgrew their existing content management system, Perch, as they grew from a small museum to a mid-sized regional history museum. The organization had long-term goals of centralizing management of multiple web properties within one platform, providing site-wide indexing of resources, and enhancing accessibility.

We had worked together in three previous redesigns of their website.

Initially, this project was simply to locate an appropriate content management system and then migrate the site.

Research

Museum staff is largely not tech-savvy, so a clunky CMS was out of the question. They'd used Wordpress in another project and didn't like it. Perch was modular and block-based, so we looked for something similar but more robust, eventually arriving at Statamic.

Statamic is a fully modular CMS that gives you that granular control. It uses blueprints for fully custom fields, and template partials for easy theming and reusable code.

Website Audit

We put together a Notion database of site sections, components, major features, pages, etc. to determine what still worked, what no longer aligned with Museum priorities, and what could be improved.

It became clear that while we could just move the content, we had an opportunity to restructure the site to better reflect the current programs and goals of the Museum.

Project Requirements

Stakeholders in cross-functional teams and at the executive level established project requirements, yielding the following goals:

Fewer steps to get the information you need (like hours or contacting research staff)
Quicker editing of content, especially emergency closures
Easier management of multiple web properties
WCAG AA-level accessibility compliance
Topics: indexing all site resources by topic, tag, and location
Version-controlled backups

Design + Development

As is the case with most projects we've worked on, design, development and testing are an iterative process, similar to an Agile workflow in an enterprise SDLC. We incorporated user testing, page speed testing, accessibility testing, and end-to-end testing for functionality.

Modernized home page

The home page is a notable area where we reduced the steps needed to view hours and ticket prices, and reimagined what a home page for the Museum can be.

The old home page feels small, and hides all of the important information behind links to other pages.

The redesign feels expansive, surfacing upcoming events, hours and ticket information, educational programs, and more.

Better Editing Experience

The emergency closure notification editing process got streamlined in the redesign. We created a scheduling feature to enter closures for holidays and other events in advance, as well as an override toggle for emergencies.

Managing multiple web properties (the museum has several online exhibits and separate projects) is now as easy as selecting the site, and jumping straight into editing. No need for separate logins or content management systems. Statamic's multi-site feature makes it simple.

Topics Feature

Scheduled for release in early 2026, Topics provides an index of all site resources filterable by broad subjects (topics), secondary subjects (tags), and geographies (locations). It's available on a per-collection basis as well as site-wide.

Topics feature on site-wide basis.

Topics feature on collection-basis.

Results

This migration project + minor redesign helps the Museum website to better align with organizational goals. It's easier to use for visitors and staff, more accessible, loads quicker, and includes nifty new features like the Topics index.

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