Promoting cultural opportunities during COVID
Ards and North Down Borough Council wanted to bring together their cultural offering - merging their legacy museum and Arts Centre website - while also developing a platform to showcase festivals in the area.
The challenge
Ards and North Down Borough Council had two separate legacy sites - Ards Arts Centre and North Down Museum - that they wanted to bring together into a single digital offering. The site also needed to provide a platform for a variety of festivals that the council produce during the year.
We carried out a detailed UX audit and in tandem with the project team developed a simple information architecture that lays out the cultural offerings across the borough for visitors and residents alike.
Our approach
Building on Drupal and the Domain Access module allowed us to easily share content between the main Culture site and the festival sites. Following an extensive UX phase we built the site to highlight the wide range of in-person activities available - either as events or courses offered by the council.
We developed a single main site - AND Culture - to highlight the core offerings of the council while the satellite festival sites can feed content into the main site as required, or keep their content entirely separate if necessary.
The results
Unfortunately the UX phase couldn't foresee the impact that COVID would have on the ability of the council to offer in person events. However, the site was built to be flexible and this was highlighted by the ease with which the focus shifted to virtual exhibitions, talks and events.