Marin Museum of Bicycling
Overview
Project
Create a web presence for the museum that gets more eyeballs on it, attracts more visitors, and generates more revenue.
Industry: Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation.
Website: https://mmbhof.org
Services
Goal and Impact
Build a website that honors the museum’s previous work while pushing on modern design and technology. SEO and accommodating an aggressive content strategy were also a focus.
For the e-commerce store and point-of-sale system, simplifying the shopping, donation, ticketing, and membership experience was mandatory. Additionally, product, member, and sales administration needed to be simple and unified into a single system.
Challenges
Filling the void of rich cycling-focused web content while generating more revenue
Get more eyes on the website and generate increased donations, memberships, and visitors.
Take advantage of the downturn in available cycling media by launching the site ASAP.
UX/UI and Creative Direction
The Museum had a design language that we needed to honor. That didn’t mean we wouldn’t try to expand it into a more current and vital identity.
The Website design uses a very clean approach with easily recognizable interface patterns and elements. The design has an integrated feel with repeated patterns, fonts, and colors. A common layout was also developed. Our goal was to ensure rapid content content creation and repeatability for editors.
Mobile View
Desktop View
Expert and Easy
I was hired after Perfect Thirds had been chosen as the agency for the new website. Very quickly, I was so comfortable with them that it felt like I was the one who hired them.
Their methods are concise yet comprehensive. In the site design and WordPress development, everything was focused on making sure the Museum could do more operating the website, but with less work.
Perfect Thirds also worked with us to move our e-commerce and POS systems off of WooCommerce and onto Square. That alone saves us a lot of time, confusion, and money.
— Aaron Allen
Executive Director
Marin Museum of Bicycling
WordPress Development
Customized and quick
We developed the website to require the Museum to only write posts and add the associated images. All content for categories and main pages as well as ticket purchasing is automated: hero sections, featured posts and events, post filtering, search, and much more.
E-commerce and Point of Sale
Doing less creates more of everything
The original website was built on WordPress, yay, with Woocommerce for e-commerce and point-of-sale (POS) functionality, not so much yay. It was slow, a bear to maintain, and confusing for the Museum to administer.
As you already know, we kept WordPress for the main site. To ensure a fast and reliable store that also reduced costs and admin time, we built a Square Online store with integrated Square POS.
- All legacy data from Woocommerce was imported into Square.
- E-commerce-related technology costs were reduced by over $1200 per year.
- Integrated POS functionality ensured all inventory was available on the website and POS system.
- Reliable and immediately available e-commerce for museum events and in-person merchandise sales is an operational benefit for the museum..
Point of Sale
SEO
We were completely focused on making the operation of both the main website and e-commerce store easy, predictable, and maybe even a pleasure to use for the Museum.
Search engine optimization (SEO) efficiency was built into the website, but we also consulted with the museum’s content team to ensure a workable SEO strategy was consistently being used.
- Editors were trained in keyphrase targeting, SEO-friendly content creation, and writing META content.
- The overall SEO strategy, more tactical than strategic, and understanding of how SEO works informed the Museum on how to develop a more cohesive and effective content strategy.
- SEO will be a large part of driving more users to the website, generating more donations and memberships, and generating more visitors as well as event participants.
