Case Study


Merging and Overhauling Two Websites for a National Museum and Hall of Fame

The Sailing Museum and National Sailing Hall of Fame website case study

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.

Separately, the 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

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. The nominations and Inductees display components leverage custom content types in WordPress to power an approval process for staff to review incoming nominations, and to convert successful nominations into Inductees to display on the front end of the website.

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.

Results

  • New WordPress website launched
  • All traffic from retired Hall of Fame website redirected to new Hall of Fame section on the merged website
  • No negative impact on SEO for content migrated from the retired website
  • Customized workflow for accepting Hall of Fame nominations with a detailed submission form, a login-only review area of the website for staff members, and a searchable and filterable library for Inductees organized by Class Year.
  • Brand style guide including refreshed web styles and combined logo and brandmark for the combined website
  • Library of redesigned website page components in line with streamlined brand
  • Comprehensive library of staff training materials, in video and written format