Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
Nadine Ishani Project Manager
Harry Edwards Front-end Dev, Back-end Build
Brian Healy Project Manager
Rob Varkonyi Back-end Dev
Maya Petranova Back-end Dev
Claudio Calautti External Designer
The Sir John Soane Museum is surely one of the most unique spaces in the UK. Un.titled has worked with them since late 2014 when, as part of a larger transformational project, we were approached to pitch for the redevelopment of their website.
Un.titled have helped us through the journey using their understanding of the museum and heritage sector as well as their technical skills and experience and are now a trusted partner helping us to continue to develop our online user offering.
Xanthe Arvanitakis, MD of Soane Museum Enterprises
Sir John Soane was an 18th century architect who collected an enormous range of objects from around the world as decoration and study aids for his eccentric London home. By the time of his death in 1837, he had successfully turned his sprawling mansion into a museum and arranged for it to be open to the public for perpetuity. It receives over 100,000 visitors a year and produces a wide variety of public engagement programming.
Un.titled, equally eccentric, has consistently provided a home for high profile digital projects across the arts, cultural, heritage and non-profit sectors of the UK for over fifteen years. We pride ourselves on being a leader in UX design, ecommerce, digital marketing and web development, and have championed Drupal since day one.
About the project
The core goal of the Sir John Soane digital transformation project was to bring the website up to the standards of the 21st century. With a website increasingly seen as a venue’s window to the world for a myriad of functionality—from basic information like opening times to complex delivery like deep database search—it must meet audience needs, which increasingly demands high performance, mobile-responsive sites.
+100% annual ecommerce revenue
+70% online event bookings
For Sir John Soane, that meant revamping their data architecture to provide a clear path through their content in a way that made sense for visitors but also gave editors powerful tools to edit this content quickly and easily. Data analysis from their previous site was key to garnering insights into what would be required, and by using our finely-honed workshopping process, these nuggets of audience wisdom were kept in the forefront throughout all critical decision-making milestones.
One upgrade that didn’t require much deliberation was the addition of a supercharged ecommerce experience for visitors, and Shopify was the clear winner for its powerful toolset and strong Drupal integration. By combining these two highly flexible platforms, we were able to theme both sides of the interaction in accordance with Soane branding, providing a fluid purchase pathway for both merchandise and ticket buying.
+12% Conversion rate on PPC campaigns
+200% Venue hire enquiries
By building comprehensive data dashboards to measure relevant KPIs for post-launch analysis, Un.titled always works to prove our efforts to the client. The ecommerce aspect of the development ended up exceeding all expectations on this front, smashing the key performance indicators we jointly set for it: the Soane shop saw a 100% increase in annual ecommerce revenue and a 70% increase in online event bookings via their new portal in the year following launch. The cherry on the cake? The museum also won the Best Online Shop award from the Association for Cultural Enterprises in 2017, validating our efforts.
Why Drupal was chosen
One of the key drivers for the new site was information architecture. The old site was hard to use, didn’t score well on findability or discoverability, and made it difficult for editors to surface content when needed. With Drupal’s powerful ability to redeploy and connect content in different ways only limited by the imagination (and, as always, the budget), it was the perfect choice for this client.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Taxonomy Menu and Site Map are generic modules that make Drupal one of the most powerful CMSs out there, and they met the need for a robust data architecture approach for this client: they boost findability and discoverability, but also make it easy for editors to move around access links and optimise their informational pathways. We find time and again that when editors feel empowered to make more of their own decisions with content instead of being restricted by rigid templates, quality goes up across the board.
This is why we spend so much time refining our own Content Toolkit module. Relating more to the presentation of content on-page rather than cross-site, this module has been continually improved by Un.titled’s unparallelled team of back-end developers to be the most versatile content presentation system we know of within the confines of a vanilla Drupal install. Since the basic package is so strong, with a huge range of features like swappable content fields for text, sound, video and more, the client often becomes emboldened to request even more bespoke content tools. The Sir John Soane museum needed a variety of flexible and powerful tools to present their huge variety of content, and our version of the content toolkit delivers.
