Drupal serves as the backbone of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM)’s digital presence, enabling a seamless, modern, and accessible experience for visitors, members, and researchers alike. For Canada’s largest museum and a leading institution of art, world culture, and natural history in North America, the ROM’s website plays a crucial role in driving in-person visits, memberships, and donations while enhancing engagement with the museum’s vast collections and educational resources.
Evolving Web partnered with LG2 to deliver a visually compelling redesign of the ROM’s website, combining strategic design expertise with Drupal’s flexible architecture, simplifying content management and enhancing the authoring experience. By implementing a streamlined content model, robust search functionalities, and intuitive navigation, the platform allows users to find exhibitions, events, and research materials effortlessly. The bilingual website ensures accessibility for diverse audiences, offering a fully inclusive and immersive digital experience that bridges online and offline interactions.
With a modernized Drupal platform, the ROM now provides a visually compelling and user-friendly interface that strengthens its brand identity, supports revenue generation, and fosters deeper connections with visitors and learners.
Goals
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.
Challenges
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 A key challenge was content complexity—43 content types, many outdated or underutilized, were consolidated to improve navigation and management.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 Evolving Web 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.
Solutions
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.
- In collaboration with LG2's design team, 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, the Evolving Web team also designed a kiosk for the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame that is showcased at the museum.
Results
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, Evolving Web 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.
Back to topDrupal’s flexibility and scalability made it the perfect CMS for the Royal Ontario Museum’s (ROM) digital transformation. A strategic migration from Drupal 7 to the latest version modernized ROM’s content infrastructure, enhancing security, accessibility, and performance while simplifying content management. By consolidating over 60 content types into just 11, we streamlined the authoring workflow and improved site maintainability.
Key benefits of Drupal for ROM:
- Optimized content workflows – Custom approval and publishing workflows empower ROM’s digital team with greater control over content creation and governance.
- Enhanced accessibility and security – Migration to the latest version of Drupal ensures compliance with modern accessibility standards and security best practices.
- Powerful media management – Seamless handling of images, videos, and digital assets enhances the presentation of exhibitions, collections, and educational materials.
- Multilingual and taxonomy-driven navigation – Robust language support and refined search tools make content easily discoverable for visitors, researchers, and educators.
- Future-proof scalability – As an open-source platform, Drupal enables ongoing innovation, allowing ROM to evolve its digital presence while maintaining high performance, security, and accessibility standards.
With Drupal at its core, ROM’s new website sets a benchmark for how cultural institutions can leverage open-source technology to engage audiences, simplify content management, and expand their digital reach.
Technical Specifications
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