Boosting a Museum’s Web Performance and Flexibility
Overview
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is a living memorial to the Holocaust. The Museum teaches millions of people each year about the dangers of unchecked hatred and the need to prevent genocide. Its website USHMM.org, the Museum’s digital gateway, allows audiences near and far to plan a visit, learn about the Holocaust, remember survivors and victims, and confront genocide and antisemitism. To make their site easier to manage, the Museum selected Velir to help them implement a new content management system (CMS) for USHMM.org.
URL
Challenge
USHMM’s CMS was implemented more than 10 years ago, so numerous customizations were made over time that caused their CMS to become increasingly unstable, unreliable, and inflexible. Due to these issues, USHMM’s staff struggled to create and update timely, relevant content for the Museum’s audiences.
Given their challenges, USHMM was looking for a new CMS that would make it easier to craft website content that meets or exceeds web standards for performance, accessibility, security, and search engine optimization (SEO). USHMM needed a reliable, modern platform they could use to house USHMM.org as well as many of the other sites the Museum provides. They also needed to preserve their current site’s design for brand continuity.
Given our extensive experience with numerous content management systems, we knew we could help them implement the right CMS to meet all their needs. We also knew that we could make content creation and management easier while allowing the Museum to exceed their site benchmarks for performance, accessibility, and security.
USHMM’s challenges included:
- Implementing a CMS with the necessary flexibility to quickly make extensive content updates
- Establishing a centralized web platform to house multiple digital properties
- Migrating designs from one CMS into another
- Implementing a CMS that could exceed web standards for site performance, accessibility, security, and SEO
Approach
We began this project with a brief discovery phase, where we closely collaborated with the Museum to understand the challenges and limitations of their CMS. We leveraged our conversations to develop business requirements for the new CMS and high-level technical architecture for their website, which we’d use to guide us through future phases of our work.
Next, we had a planning phase in which we wrote detailed functional and integration specifications, established a design system, crafted a content author workflow process, composed a content migration and redirects plan, and devised a detailed task-based development plan.
With a clear vision and comprehensive development instructions, we moved to our implementation phase. We leveraged Contentful’s flexibility and tools to plan a content model that established structure and hierarchy for content and data. The content model powered content types, custom components, localized/translated content, and reusable content structures that served the needs of the USHMM’s content authors and site visitors.
The new site’s front-end architecture was built to be scalable and extensible using a Headless/JAMStack model, and our certified web accessibility specialists ensured the site was WCAG 2.1 AA compliant not only to help meet the needs of those with disabilities but also to make the website more effective for everyone. Meanwhile, we configured third-party integrations with USHMM’s digital assessment management (DAM) system, and we built a custom app inside Contentful so content authors can seamlessly access the Museum’s vast library of historical images from the DAM. We also established an integration for the Museum’s calendaring tool to make it much easier to manage events on the site.
The Museum’s content authors were key players throughout this project. Their valuable feedback helped us address pain points from the Museum’s legacy CMS to significantly improve their content authoring experience. To set up authors for success and ensure they could take advantage of Contentful’s great new features, we provided them with detailed training and documentation to facilitate content migration of 4,000 pages from the old site to the new one.
Our approach included:
- Developing business requirements for the CMS and high-level technical architecture for the site to guide our work
- Performing comprehensive planning that covered functional and integration specifications, a design system, content author workflows, content migration, redirects, and a detailed task-based development plan
- Leveraging Contentful’s flexibility and tools to build a content model with robust components and page-type libraries
- Building the site to be scalable and extensible with a Headless/JAMStack model
- Conducting thorough testing and accessibility review
- Configuring third-party integrations with USHMM’s DAM and building a custom app inside Contentful so content authors can access the Museum’s library of historical images
- Creating detailed training and documentation for the Museum’s content authors to set them up for success
Solution
We launched the new USHMM.org website in Contentful, which provides a strong, stable, and scalable digital presence for the Museum that will last for years to come. Between Contentful itself and the pain points we addressed from USHMM’s legacy CMS; content authoring is significantly easier. Content authors have a flexible, deep library of reusable components they can use to manage the website, and helpful integrations with the Museum’s DAM, which makes it simple to draw on the Museum’s vast collection of historical images. Performance, accessibility, security, and SEO were all improved substantially, while the look and feel of the site itself remained consistent. Since launch, USHMM has transitioned to working with our Managed Services team, which continues to support and enhance the site moving forward.
Results:
- A successful migration of USHMM.org into Contentful
- Enhanced user experience
- A strong, stable, scalable web platform capable of hosting multiple digital properties and translated/localized content
- Significantly easier content authoring that resolves pain points from USHMM’s legacy CMS
- A robust library of reusable components for content authors
- Useful integrations with the Museum’s DAM and calendaring tools
- Improved performance, security, accessibility, and SEO