Responses by Bluecadet.

Background: It’s not well known that Los Angeles’s Natural History Museum, the La Brea Tar Pits and the William S. Hart Museum are all part of one organization. With the launch of nhmlac.org, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLA) is unifying the three institutions and what the museums share: accessible and engaging experiences created of, for and with the people of Los Angeles County.

Design features: At its core, nhmlac.org is the user-friendly digital home for all of NHMLA’s digital properties. We centralized a content stream of more than 35 subdomains, microsites and blogs. Our design system unites three museums and puts a new focus on featuring each location with beautiful photography and compelling videos.

New skills: Underlying the new site is a reimagined editorial and content strategy. With that perspective, we learned a lot through consolidating more than a dozen separate sites and blogs into one system. It took a great deal of care and attention to develop a unified system that lets content flow easily through the organization and directs users to information that’s relevant to their interests.

Navigation structure: We wanted to facilitate visitor discovery by creating a new navigation approach that aggregates related events, programming and stories by selected interests. Global navigation bridges the four websites and three locations.

Technology: We created the site using Drupal 7. Our team also worked on new features for the WYSIWYG CKEditor to create a user-friendly site experience.