Medalta is an innovative, industrial non-profit museum, contemporary ceramic arts facility, art gallery and community hub in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada. Located within a converted century-old factory, it has become an exciting place where cutting-edge technologies meet historic restoration and archaeology come together. Their existing website did not do the Medalta justice; was poorly organized content and a lack of direction made for a lacklustre user experience.
Having grown immensely since the conception of their original website, we wanted to highlight the various markets, exhibitions, programs, and residencies offered. We also wanted to capture their gorceious facility and the heritage it embodies. From a techincal perspective, an update to their websites infrastructure and back end was also necessary to bring it up to industry standard practices.
We overhauled the organization of the website navigation, matching their external branding and marketing efforts to main four categories – Learning, Creativity, Heritage, and Community. It was important to organize the massive amount of content into an easy to navigate and user-friendly structure. We also wanted to highlight the facility and feature some of their incredible photography, events, and programs more prominently.
An easy to use content management system was implemented in order to make the back end of the website accessible for staff to make updates, change content, and add new events. We also modernized the website to include industry-standard practices such as search engine optimization, responsive design, and an SSL certificate.
Since launching the new website, users have been spending more time on the website and their organic search results have vastly improved. On average, their new user count has almost doubled and their page views have increased from an average of 2,500 in 2017 to an average of 9,000 since their website went live in early 2018. The majority of their traffic coming from organic search results.
