Somerset House
The clientanchor
Somerset House is a space where art and culture are imagined, made and experienced by 3 million visitors every year. It is home to a large community of creative businesses, artists and makers - including Somerset House Studios - offering a diverse and dynamic programme of contemporary arts and culture.
The challengeanchor
Somerset House is a centre for modern arts designed for today's audiences and creatives. However, this cutting-edge cultural offering was not reflected in their online presence.
Their digital channels needed to mirror their artistic programme, to truly represent their contemporary brand so an update of the design and technology of their site was urgently needed.
The solutionanchor
We wanted to perform a digital transformation, showcasing Somerset House as a unique and dynamic destination. The new website would be used to demonstrate their distinctive heritage, rich cultural breadth and creative enterprise.
As Somerset House is a well-loved space with many visitors, gaining insight from the users was crucial. So, to help us understand the needs and motivations of both the current and potential audiences, we completed in-depth research, which led to our team creating a design that focused on dynamic and moving imagery, visually engaging visitors whilst reflecting the energy of the unique physical space.
The technology used needed to be robust as the site attracts 2.5 million visitors every year. However, the approach also needed to be flexible enough to reflect the areas of art and culture that Somerset House displays.
A complex search solution needed to be at the heart of the development to fulfil the needs of visitors. This solution needed to be flexible enough to cover site-wide, events and resident artists. With many departments (IT, marketing and press teams) maintaining the site, the backend also needed to be easy to use.
Our solution was to build an open-source Drupal CMS to manage the content. We paired this with an Apache Solr search setup to give visitors a powerful search experience. We then integrated Somerset House's current CRM system with the new solution.
Our team also added editorial tools to provide automation and dynamic content surfacing. This helped to present related content from across the site to visitors. The aim of this was to reduce overheads for manual maintenance and to future-proof the site.
Launched in November 2016, the new site exceeded the expectations of the client.
It's a huge change from where we were and is getting a fantastic response from staff, residents, trustees and visitors. We feel that you have really captured the essence and energy of Somerset House.
Somerset House Team
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