Seattle Aquarium

Inspiring conservation with a new Drupal website

Since 1977, educating, invoking awe, and inspiring visitors to take action in the protection of the world’s oceans has been the singular goal of the Seattle Aquarium. Together with a Drupal website, they could make that vision a reality.

SERVICES PROVIDED
Drupal Development

DESIGN PARTNER: FELL SWOOP

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Meet Seattle Aquarium

Meet Seattle Aquarium

Crafting a Drupal 8 website that excites and inspires.

The Seattle Aquarium situated along the downtown waterfront of Elliott Bay is one of the ten most-visited aquariums in the United States and offers visitors a glimpse of Puget Sound wildlife in several major exhibits. With a high influx of visitors, both online and in person, it was crucial that the Seattle Aquarium had a website that could excite, inspire, and inform.

The Challenge

The Seattle Aquarium team found that most visits—and prospective visits—to the aquarium began with a visit to the Seattle Aquarium website. Although website content was updated frequently, the underlying technical build of the website hadn’t been updated in years and the Seattle Aquarium team found it difficult to manage.

The Seattle Aquarium team narrowed down their project’s goals to three priorities:

They wanted a website that would be easy to manage and update, now and years in the future.
They wanted a website that would be more accessible to visitors, across all screens and all devices.
They wanted a website with a modern design and a fantastic user experience.

The Solution

For the website's UX and design, we partnered with one of our preferred design partners, Fell Swoop.

Fell Swoop worked closely with the Aquarium team to rearrange and improve the information architecture of the website to ensure that the core components, ticket sales, information about the aquarium, and donation portals, were always just one click away.

We recommended that the best way to move forward would be to build a new technology foundation to support both the designs from Fell Swoop and the Aquarium plans for future content. The first step would be to move to Drupal 8 for the content management system.

Drupal 8 is equipped with a full suite of administrative tools that allows website admin to perform complex content management tasks, such as creating new page layouts, managing menus, uploading and placing media, building web forms, and managing the search. In addition, Drupal 8 also comes equipped with tools that enable accessibility and make browsing easier for visitors browsing with assistive technology.

a screenshot showing various sizes of the Seattle Aquarium website

The Results

After first constructing the website and then implementing the designs from Fell Swoop, we then assisted Seattle Aquarium with the migration of its content, moving all valuable content from its old website to its new website.

Previously, the Seattle Aquarium blog had been managed separately from a different domain. When building their new website, we created a section specifically for the blog. Our content integrator then hand-migrated all blog posts to the new website, in addition to formatting them.

We were pleased to see the Seattle Aquarium website launch right on time.

Project Highlights

Calendar Function

A new calendar function was added to match the design of the website and track upcoming events

Member Portal

We configured the Membership page on the Seattle Aquarium website to offer users the full range of membership options while keeping payment processing concise and simple.

Tide Tracking

On the front page of the Seattle Aquarium website, you can see updates of the Puget Sound tides. The integration was configured and implemented to fit with the rest of the Seattle Aquarium design.