Case Study
Merging and Overhauling Two Websites for a National Museum and Hall of Fame
The Challenge
The core challenge of this project was merging two separate websites maintained by one nonprofit organization. The Sailing Museum is a beautiful, physical museum space in Newport, Rhode Island and had a website oriented towards museum visitors.
The same organization also hosts the National Sailing Hall of Fame, which had a separate website hosting information about individuals inducted into the Hall each year. Both websites were built on WordPress, were suffering from deferred maintenance, and were challenging to update.
I teamed up with Eve Simon Creative to tackle this project: Eve led design and layout, and I handled the content audit, architecture, and website build.
Ed’s excellent technical skills, coupled with his passion for nonprofits and his thoughtfulness on creative solutions, was the secret sauce we wanted in our lives. He created a superior, professional yet still ardent combined presence that will grow and thrive with us. His attention to detail is unmatched and he consistently executes on time! It was a pleasure to collaborate on this important project, and we trust him as a long-term advisor. Can’t wait to tackle more projects with him at the helm.
Tara Lynch, Board Member and project liaison, The Sailing Museum and National Sailing Hall of Fame
Our Process
We started our process with a detailed content audit of both websites, exploring the content and architecture of both sites and developing a plan for how to integrate content into a single website. We reviewed the user journeys the new website needs to support, and developed a sitemap that ensures different content types are easy to find and navigate.
Eve led the process of reviewing the organizations existing brand identity and developed a new logo lockup and visual identity that incorporates elements from both websites. The result was a refreshed, simple color palette, updated font selections, and a series of repeatable page sections to use across the new website.
The website includes a searchable, filterable library of Hall of Fame inductees and a newly redesigned nomination process for the Class of 2025. Leveraging WordPress’s powerful custom content types features, the website allows users to submit detailed nominations for potential Hall of Fame inductees, which are managed in a customized dashboard by internal users. Successful nominations are then converted into Inductee profiles, to be displayed on the front end of the website when the next Class Year is announced.
With approvals on the site design, we migrated existing content, and carefully assembled and tested redirects to ensure no website traffic would be lost as we retired one website and launched the new, merged website.
