This redesign began when the Design Museum wanted to refresh their site to fit with a new signage program and a new graphic identity of their print materials. In addition, the museum staff had been unable to update the site at regular intervals, so there was also a need for a versatile and expandable CMS.

What the museum got was an incredibly straightforward interface and a CMS that offers no restrictions to the design or presentation of the exhibition content.

The navigation and image placement dynamically shift based on the amount of content and image placement on the page and how much prominence it requires. The result is a simple, shifting design pardigm that makes the site functional but also lend itself to design changes, changing exhibits and the growth of the museum.

• Google Analytics is monitored regularly to decide on upgrades that will further improve the stickiness of the site.

• During the publish process, the CMS generates highly optimized templates that require almost zero processing per page view thus keeping final page load times to a minimum.

• The bespoke CMS and public site both run on Ruby on Rails and a MySQL database; the technology duo resulted in an incredibly user-friendly yet sophisticated CMS.