A Vibrant Digital Transformation for a World-Class Museum

Evolving Web redesigned the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) website to create an engaging digital experience that drives in-person visits while enhancing the museum's online presence. The project focuses on strengthening brand recognition, inspiring visitor engagement and loyalty, and generating revenue for this iconic North American Arts, Culture, and Natural History Museum.  Beyond accessibility, our goal is to deliver an inclusive and immersive experience that bridges online and offline interactions. By leveraging dynamic, timely, and curated content, we aim to captivate diverse audiences and elevate their connection with the ROM.

The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is a leading institution of art, world culture, and natural history. Located in Toronto, it is the largest museum in Canada and one of the largest in North America, attracting over one million visitors annually. Its collection comprises 18 million artworks, cultural artifacts, and natural history specimens across 40 galleries and exhibition spaces. Guided by its new Strategic Direction, the ROM is positioning itself as a foremost 21st-century cultural institution.

The redesign focused on aligning the ROM’s website with its updated visual identity and positioning it as a leading 21st-century museum. Key objectives included enhancing the user experience to boost ticket sales, drive membership acquisition and renewals, and encourage donations, and provide resources and learning opportunities for offsite visitors. The site was tailored to engage diverse audiences—occasional visitors, experts, educators, and learners. We wanted to make it as easy as possible for visitors to see opening hours and plan their visit. Additionally, the redesign prioritized overall accessibility and bilingual content support, ensuring everyone can have meaningful connections with the museum.

Redesigning the ROM website required simplifying the information architecture while accommodating diverse content and objectives. A key challenge was content complexity—43 content types, many outdated or underutilized, were consolidated to improve navigation and management. Editors needed training to adapt to the new content model, ensuring a smooth transition while maintaining content integrity. 

The team also had to balance the sometimes conflicting requirements of different user groups, including museum visitors, researchers, and educators/digital learners, to create a seamless and intuitive experience for all.

Evolving Web implemented a ground-up redesign of the ROM website, leveraging the latest version of Drupal and introducing significant improvements in functionality, content management, and user interaction. Key solutions included:

• Developing content types that support diverse communications needs while guiding authors to create purposeful content.
  Improving the page-building and authoring experience, enabling authors to focus on strategy and audience engagement.
• Establishing clear workflows to move content from draft to publication seamlessly.
• Grouping ROM events on one page, making it easy to view and find, which is essential for an institution hosting hundreds of events annually.
• Adding robust search functionalities and intuitive navigation to help visitors find relevant content effortlessly.
• Offering a fully bilingual website, with content in both English and French, and integrated translation tools that use automated translation with human editing.
• Integrating multimedia content to engage users in the museum’s rich collections and exhibitions.
• Creating easy pathways to membership placed strategically throughout the interface.
• Improving access to collections, research, resources, and educational materials for teachers to support classroom learning.
• Highlighting compelling gallery visuals to create a vivid impression of the museum space.
• Delivering a beautiful, dynamic front-end experience that enhances user engagement, providing a visually stunning and seamless journey through the ROM's digital space. 
• Successfully migrating content and files from Drupal 7 to a modern Drupal platform.

In conjunction with the website redesign, our team also designed a kiosk for the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame that is showcased at the museum.

The website now drives more than 50 % of ticket purchases, enhances user engagement, and highlights the value of membership. It prominently features the events calendar, showcasing the 800+ events hosted by the ROM each year.

By reducing the number of content types from 60 to just 11, we enhanced the content management experience, making it easier to maintain the CMS. We also improved search functionality by removing irrelevant content and implementing better tagging and content types, ensuring more accurate and relevant search results. Additionally, the updated visual identity was successfully integrated across the site, ensuring consistency with the ROM’s brand and strengthening their most important communications platform.