React
When it comes to managing large and diverse collections, React is a modular, flexible and adaptable component-based framework that can revitalise your processes and create a standout user experience.
React’s powerful search component breaks data down into four separate indexes, allowing collection items to be quickly found and managed. We have harnessed the capabilities of React across several projects with great success.
Working with the Contemporary Art Society (CAS), we integrated React with their new Drupal website. CAS needed to display 18,000 pages of collections on the new website and so, it was vital to have adequate search component. React ticked every box for our client’s requirements. Its component-based design allows the search functionality to be continuously enhanced without any reconfiguration of search logic. This gives CAS the flexibility to make changes in the future.
By utilising React, our team achieved the following:
- 84% increase in organic search
- 14% improvement in engagement rate
- 113% rise in total sessions
We also achieved impressive Google Lighthouse scores boosting mobile performance by 27% and best-practice by 33%. Website speed and carbon scores also improved.
Headless Solutions
Headless solutions are ideal for organisations selling products through an ecommerce store where product catalogues can be vast and difficult to manage.
We have implemented headless solutions to separate an organisation’s ecommerce and Content Management System (CMS). This allows UX, site speed and navigation to be enhanced, taking engagement to a new level. As a result, your visitors have a better user experience and product catalogues are easier to manage.
For our client Mall Galleries, we switched their ecommerce platform from Drupal 7 to BigCommerce in conjunction with moving their CMS to the upgraded Drupal 10 platform. This led to an 84% increase in site performance, as well as Google Lighthouse scores of 95 for accessibility and 100 for best practice.
Dedicated Solutions
There are many dedicated solutions for collection management that can tackle ongoing issues.
Qi, a popular solution from Keep Thinking acts as a database to store records. It can be integrated with an organisation’s website to provide visitors with access to collections.
We completed essential integration work between the Qi database and the new Drupal CAS website. With more than 16,000 records in Qi comprising of 14,000 individual objects, people, artists, organisations and museums, our team needed to map out and complete a challenging data transfer.
To improve the user experience, we had a unique idea to enable a Wikipedia integration. This allows CAS to extract information on an artist from their Wikipedia page all within Qi, making this process quicker and more efficient.
Find the right collections management solution for you
If you’d like to explore these solutions further or discuss your collection management challenges, we’d love to chat.
Our dedicated team of digital experts can help you identify the right technology for your organisation’s needs, saving you crucial time and resource.
In our whitepaper, we provide more insight on this topic, other available solutions and more results from our broad portfolio of arts & culture projects. Speak to our team to simplify your collections management and drive results.
