Frye Art Museum
Dynamic Drupal 9 Website for Cutting-Edge Art Museum
Meet the Frye Art Museum
The Frye Art Museum, located in the heart of Seattle’s First Hill neighborhood since 1952, is a cutting-edge art institution. As the city’s only free art museum, the Frye is at the forefront of supporting emerging artists with an ever-evolving array of exhibitions, community programs, and educational initiatives to welcome people in.
When the Frye team approached Bear Group, they needed a fresh start with a new website to reflect the full breadth of the museum, create connections between content, be easier for their team to manage, and be a welcoming space.
Content Framework Planning
The Frye Art Museum team was manually having to connect related content on the existing website. The new website needed to be flexible enough so their team could feature and connect exhibitions, community, and educational content while also creating opportunities for visitors to easily discover these based on their interests.
With this in mind, the Bear Group team started by conducting a content audit of the current website, outlining how content could flow throughout the new website, and then planning the content types, taxonomies, and initial site map for the new website.
New Brand
The Frye team worked with design partner Polymode on a dynamic brand refresh and to produce the design and user experience for the website. We participated in design calls, offering technical guidance along the way.
The innovative website design shines a spotlight on the diverse community of artists doing amazing things locally and globally. It includes a side navigation making it easy for website visitors to go deeper into the site and follow their interests.
“The website is a first opportunity to help people feel comfortable coming to the museum.”
A Fresh Start on Drupal 9
Knowing the Frye Art Museum content strategy, custom design needs, and future integrations, we recommended the new website be built on Drupal 9 content management system (CMS). Drupal is a powerful and highly customizable platform that can grow with the museum well into the future.
We set out to build the new Frye Art Museum website with a simple-to-manage admin interface at the heart of it all. With the design and information architecture in hand, the website could be carefully constructed using the tools available in Drupal 9. This included a variety of content types, paragraphs, new entities, and related fields and data types to support the content.
Notable Project Highlights
- Flexible, fully customizable landing pages with the ability for their team to easily adapt the theme.
- Extensive custom views to dynamically feed content throughout the site using taxonomies. This is what pulls in related content across exhibitions, programs, events, and blog posts.
- The blog, previously on a separate platform, came together with the rest of the website in Drupal.
- The Frye’s Shopify store was themed to align with the new design.
The new vibrant and welcoming Frye Art Museum website launched in June 2022.