Tate
Museums

The clientanchor

The Tate contains four art museums, housing the UK's national collection of British and international modern and contemporary art.

Its mission is to increase the public’s enjoyment and understanding of British art.

The challengeanchor

The Tate Museums needed to update their existing hosting to support a new Drupal CMS, to provide a powerful, integrated search across the Tate Group websites. They also needed to develop and deploy a complex and sophisticated platform.

Despite having a skilled in-house web development and information systems team, they did not have experience of the technologies required for their ambitious project. To move forward they needed a team with extensive experience of Drupal, Varnish and Solr who could design, and put in place, a scalable infrastructure.

The solutionanchor

Our team began by designing and implementing a new hosting and technical architecture, the essential foundation for The Tate Museums ambitious project.

Once this infrastructure was complete, we worked alongside the in-house Tate web team. Designing, developing and deploying the brand-new Tate Online platform.

Due to the complex search requirements for the new platform, we employed a Solr search. This allowed us to develop a search solution which would work across all the Tate Group websites.

All this work has led to a strong relationship that continues to this day and A12 are now providing the Tate Group with on-going support and maintenance.

Client responseanchor

In 2012 Tate re-launched its website as the culmination of a two-year project. Although Tate has skilled in-house web development and information systems teams, the technologies that we selected were not ones that we had extensive experience of: Drupal, Varnish, Solr, High Scalable infrastructure, says John Stack, Head of Tate Online. Furthermore, the new website was to be launched on a new hosting infrastructure.