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St Albans Museums launches Shopify store

11/02/2021 - Insights

St Albans Museums is a fantastic cultural destination at the heart of the beautiful city of St Albans. A world-class centre of arts and culture, it has been welcoming visitors since it reopened its doors in 2018 following the completion of a major transformation and renovation project. In the same year, as part of the same transformation project, Un.titled redeveloped the St Albans Museums website and Eventbrite event integration.

Last year, 2020, was a year like no other. So despite a really positive first few years of operation, nothing could have prepared the museum for the challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic would bring. With museums around the world having to shut their doors to the general public, finding new ways of reaching their audience has and continues to be a high priority. As part of this response, back in June 2020, we told you about a new Shopify project we were embarking on with the team at St Albans Museums.

A shot of the frontage of St Albans Museum

What we did

As part of their reassessment of how to respond to the new normal, the St Albans Museums team wanted to expand and diversify their income – something especially important given the challenges the pandemic presented and exclusion of foot traffic for many months.

They also needed support in responding to new measures brought about by the pandemic and put in place to help managing access and in-person visits.

Targeted products

The new St Albans Museums Shopify store sells an extensive range of merchandise and products from the museum’s physical store. This includes prints of historical documents, a range of special gifts and homeware inspired by the historic city, beautiful and unique gifts all inspired by their collections (as well as past exhibitions and installations) and a range specifically aimed at families.

The Shopify store is integrated with the Drupal website, such that products can be introduced to content as part of the website’s content toolkit, and the integration extends to shipping the embedded mini-basket and checkout – so website users can buy products without leaving the site.

Membership

The store also supports development, selling St Albans Museums membership (another crucial long-term income stream).

Adjusting to new challenges

A vital addition to the new website and store was the ability for people to secure timed entry slots for the museum.

Similar to our work with Sir John Soane Museum, we achieved this using the BookThatApp app. This is an important feature during any period where the museum could reopen with limited attendance and social distancing rules in place.

Shopify

Using the Debut theme as the basis for store layouts, we then customised the design to match the brand, as well as UX and visual design of the existing website.

The Shopify homepage looks almost identical to their existing Drupal site. The customisation wasn’t simply a case of copying the header and footer. Time was spent on micro animations, scrolling effects, fonts and call to actions to create continuity between the new store and the existing website. This took lots of customisation work but undoubtedly makes things feel consistent and delivering the same seamless experience for users.

To support museum staff in managing what might be new processes, the site’s backend was also configured to be easy to use. This is important given there’s been so much change in recent times.

Working with the St Albans Museums team and a strong brand and design, we’ve been able to bring a beautiful, coherent and easy-to-manage digital experience to the new ecommerce offer.
Michael Kent, Operations Director, Un.titled