In late 2024 we were engaged to build an entirely new web presence for both the Royal BC Museum and BC Archives, a process that took us deep into one of British Columbia’s top cultural destinations and offered the chance to work with a dynamic team in the midst of organizational change.

A must-see destination for generations of Victoria residents and visitors, the Royal BC Museum has changed and grown in its 140 years. New and upgraded facilities and an ambitious reconciliation and repatriation program to amend relationships with Indigenous peoples are among the changes that inspired the website remake, along with the need to re-introduce the Museum to its communities post-Covid.

The challenges and the stakes made this one of our most ambitious projects yet, and after over a year of work we could not be happier with the results.

Visit rbcm.ca
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Highlights

Pathways to exploration

When visiting the Museum, visitors will find a main path through the galleries, as well as many side doors that allow them to explore and choose their own way through the exhibitions without ever feeling lost. It’s an experience that happens beyond eye-level, with many opportunities to gaze upward starting from the lobby and through nearly every area.

Photo of a large human figure wood carving with arms outstretched
Photo of a man standing in a darkened room looking at a physical display of deer in the forest
Photo close up of a hand holding a specimen jar holding a preserved crab
Photo of a round exhibition room at the museum with placards and screens on the walls, and a lone person regarding the display. The ceiling is an illustration of a blue sky with fluffy clouds.
Photo of shelves with various animal skulls
Photo of a darkened room with an illuminated bench with First Nations art wall flanked by First Nations carved poles. A skylight is overhead providing some extra illumination from a grey sky
Photo of First Nations art on the side of a small building depicting a stylized smiling face.
Photo of two people looking at a display screen in a room with several vertical placards on wooden walls.
Every project starts with an in-person experience audit. Snapshots from our 2-day on-site visit evoke strong memories.

Our design hints at those ‘look up’ moments of awe and constantly invites people to choose any path that looks interesting without the risk of feeling lost.

Homepage and Curiosity Prompt

The homepage is, in a word, long, and that’s no accident.

Like many organizations, the Museum offers much more than most people know about. We leaned into that reality by creating a homepage that feels like a stroll—or scroll, in this case—that unfolds into many directions, drawing from our own experience of visiting in-person.

At the top of the homepage a 3D carousel that we call the Curiosity Prompt invites discovery, showcasing current happenings, deep cuts from the collection, and special events. The featured items will be updated frequently to show visitors the variety of what’s on offer, and keep the homepage fresh.

The Curiosity Prompt in action on the Royal BC Museum homepage.

The homepage expands with exterior and interior snapshots through a subtle photo interaction. A showcase area features current exhibitions and events, and nudges people to explore the IMAX® theatre microsite.

All Museum programming lives on the homepage in a robust calendar area optimized for the timeframes that visitors plan within.

Screenshot of the RBCM calendar. The heading What's Happening is followed by a number of filter buttons for different event types. A number of collapsing sections are shown with the headings Today: January 7, Rest of January, February, March and Beyond. The Today section is open showing an event called Mindfulness at the Museum and the text describes the event along with its time, price, and a button for more info and tickets.
The at-a-glance events calendar on the Royal BC Museum homepage.

Menus for everyone, especially for you

As with every project, we give special attention to navigation. Alongside the usual suspects that provide visitor logistics information and current happenings, we found the need for a new category that spoke to the many ways that people can relate to the Museum.

Our research revealed how any one person can relate to the Museum in very different ways. On one day an elementary school teacher might look for educational resources, on another be hosting visitors to Victoria, and on yet another be following their interest in natural history. That same person has very different needs on each visit.

To serve these modes we created the RBCM For You menu, with each entry summarizing what the Museum has to offer people with a specific context or interest and provide inroads to website content that fits those needs.

Screenshot of the RBCM website navigation with the item RBCM for You open. A series of tabs along the side describe different communities. The initial tab is selected and reads You are Welcome Here. The content of the tab briefly welcomes people and presents a series of image-background buttons that lead to different sections of the menu.
Screenshot of the RBCM website navigation with the item RBCM for You open. A series of tabs along the side describe different communities. The For Educators tab is selected and the content displays information about learning experiences at RBCM with a photo of a group of children raising their hands around a museum display.
Screenshot of the RBCM website navigation with the item RBCM for You open. A series of tabs along the side describe different communities. The For Visitors to Victoria tab is selected and the content displays a photo of the museum and text describes the museum offerings. A large Buy Tickets button appears under the text and image.
The RBCM for You menu is tailored to different visitor interests.

This visitor-centric orientation tested extremely well, often working as a safety net for moments of uncertainty when looking for information. The naming of the overall menu and its various parts convey the welcoming nature of the Museum, and highlight the communities it serves.

Multi-database Search

The Museum and BC Archives host a number of databases for specialized areas such as collections and genealogy. Our search implementation used a blended approach that provides instant, filterable results across the Museum and Archives websites simultaneously, and a number of jumping-off points for starting searches in niche databases.

Consolidating the search options under a single interface not only makes searching more efficient, it helps surface these different research options that the Museum provides but aren’t always known to visitors.

Animated gif of the search interface in use. The word 'research' is typed into the search box and results appear instantly with filters along the left side. Two tabs separate the results for the museum website and the archives website.
Search results across the Royal BC Museum and BC Archives website appear instantly.

A new process for creating website content

We also worked extensively with the Museum’s Digital Team to copywrite the majority of new pages and establish a voice throughout the site. However, one of our top concerns was equipping them to carry that standard forward in the future when we’re less involved.

To that end, we helped create a new process for receiving new content requests and crafting new pages. Then, we put that process into action with weekly editorial meetings with the Digital Team. These regular cycles gave the team chances to work with the site repeatedly, provide feedback to us, and incorporate feedback from other departments.

All these behind-the-scenes changes gave the team the necessary experience to take the wheel on future content, confidently backed by the rest of the Museum.

Learn more about our content refresh for RBCM

See our bespoke strategies for helping the Museum take on a major content migration project, achieving buy-in from the whole organization along the way.

Read the blog post

(Re-)Discovering a part of BC’s cultural heritage

It was enlightening to find that the Royal BC Museum is in so many ways a place of change: it boasts a frequent and lively event schedule, new exhibitions alongside older ones undergoing modernization, community outreach, and institutional evolution. About half of our team had visited in the past and during our on-site experience audit, all remarked on how much was different from earlier memories.

There are many messages that the new RBCM website communicates, but the most important is that a Museum like this is worth revisiting. Not only do sensibilities and knowledge change, but visitors themselves change over time and develop truly new understanding by bringing their own life experience to each visit.

So if you haven’t been, you should go. If you have been, you should go again. The RBCM site is not a just snapshot of where the institution is now, but a portal for showcasing a British Columbia as it was and will be in the future.

Acknowledgements

Our concluding notes would be incomplete without mentioning the incredible collaboration with the RBCM Digital Team. Eric, Mel, Aidan, and Nicholas have been among the best team members we’ve worked on any project of this scale, and we immensely appreciate their trust, hard work, and generous spirit in working together. The success of this project owes as much to them as it does to our own team.

And of course we have to recognize Sam Dal Monte’s design contributions. Sam has worked with us on many projects and this was by far the largest. His incredible skill and deep thinking are integral to the quality of work, and we’re proud to work with him.

Visit rbcm.ca
Visit bcarchives.ca