Solution Case Study

Seattle Art Museum Creates Visually Rich Website that Entices Visitors and Supporters

OverviewCompany: Seattle Art MuseumCompany Website: www.seattleartmuseum.orgCompany Size: 200 employeesCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Nonprofit

Company ProfileThe Seattle Art Museum (SAM) is one of the preeminent art museums in the Pacific Northwest region. It serves the Northwest region and visitors to the Seattle area.

Business SituationAs part of a larger rebranding effort, SAM wanted to overhaul its website, which was not as engaging or easy to maintain as the staff wanted it to be.

SolutionSAM worked with branding and technology partners to rebuild the SAM public website on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013.

Benefits Beautiful, easy-to-use website Potential for enhanced attendance,

revenue generation Maintenance ease keeps site fresh

“SharePoint 2013 really helps us showcase the Seattle Art Museum experience in a beautiful and compelling way.”

Cara Egan, Director of Public Relations and Marketing, Seattle Art Museum

The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) used Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 to refresh its 12-year-old website and turn its online presence into a beautiful virtual showcase of the museum’s exhibitions, collections, and programs. SAM anticipates that the visually rich, easy-to-navigate site will attract more museum visitors, donations, and sponsors, and build the museum’s reputation as one of the country’s great art museums. The site is also far easier to update, which keeps information fresh.

SharePoint CustomerSolution Case Study

SituationThe Seattle Art Museum (SAM) provides a welcoming place for citizens and visitors of Seattle to connect with art and consider its relationship to their lives. SAM has three locations: the Seattle Art Museum in downtown Seattle, the Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park, and the Olympic Sculpture Park on the Seattle waterfront.

In late 2012, SAM undertook a rebranding effort to unify its three very distinct destinations and experiences under one holistic brand. The goal was to create a new identity, marketing materials, and website that mirrored SAM’s “connect art to life” mission. It was critical that the website, which is the biggest expression of the brand, beautifully embody the new brand and also simplify the management of the museum’s vast online content.

Created 12 years earlier, the SAM website’s design had not fundamentally changed since then and had in fact become clogged with ancillary microsites and add-ons that made navigation difficult and, visually, a disjointed experience. The site had become a barrier rather than a path to communicating with constituents.

“The site was wall-to-wall words, the opposite of what you want a museum website to be, which is wall-to-wall visuals,” says Kevin Schroer, Creative Director at Seattle Art Museum. “We were seeing decent site visitor numbers—some 180,000 unique visitors a month—but their engagement time on the site was between zero and 10 seconds. We were squandering the opportunity to turn website visitors into museum visitors; people were coming to the site, but we were losing them.”

SAM wanted a beautiful and easy-to-use website that would represent its expansive

collections and exhibitions, help people learn about its programs and events, and drive more visitors into the museum. “Seattle is such an innovative and tech-savvy city. We wanted the website for the city’s largest art museum to ‘feel’ like Seattle,” says Cara Egan, Director of Public Relations and Marketing for Seattle Art Museum. SAM wanted website visitors to not only be enticed by the site but to have a consistent experience everywhere on the site.

It also wanted museum staff to be able to update the site easily. Updates to the original site had to be made by the IT staff, which had become a bottleneck to keeping information fresh.

SolutionIn late 2012, the Seattle Art Museum hired Hornall Anderson, a global branding firm, to help it overhaul its website. Because SAM used Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for internal collaboration, it asked Hornall Anderson to use the latest version of that software—Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013—for the website.

“We were really impressed with SharePoint 2013,” says Nick Thiel, Design Director at Hornall Anderson. “We already knew that it offered great administrative flexibility, but SharePoint 2013 also shone as an excellent content management system for external-facing websites, capable of delivering rich user experiences. Everything we needed for SAM could be done in SharePoint 2013.”

To provide SharePoint development expertise, Hornall Anderson brought in Buildingi, a local technical services company, SharePoint expert, and member of the Microsoft Partner Network. “We made a great team: Hornall Anderson provided the branding and user experience,

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“We were really impressed with SharePoint 2013. We already knew that it offered great administrative flexibility, but SharePoint 2013 also shone as an excellent content management system for external-facing websites, capable of delivering rich user experiences.”

Nick Thiel, Design Director, Hornall Anderson

and Buildingi brought deep SharePoint development skills,” Thiel says.Hornall Anderson began by creating a new logo system and visual identity for SAM, designed to bring the three distinct museum locations under one conceptual umbrella. This identity unification influenced the structure of the website user experience.

With the brand architecture in place, Hornall Anderson focused on creating a clean, minimalist website design aesthetic that focused on showcasing the museum’s art and simplifying site administration. Instead of launching visitors off to myriad microsites with different looks and experiences, Hornall Anderson made special-exhibit sites an integral part of the main site design. When it was necessary to link the website to existing business systems—such as the ticket sales system, events database, image library, and others that the museum didn’t want to recreate in SharePoint—Buildingi did so using the Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in SharePoint 2013. In all, about nine line-of-business applications link to the website using BCS.

“When we received the finished site design from Hornall Anderson, we knew that it had to be a pixel-perfect site—every image and page had to look and behave a certain way, every line had to be on a precise screen pixel, and it all had to look perfect on every device,” says Roberto Yglesias, Business Technology Director at Buildingi. The ability to develop custom master pages and page layouts in SharePoint 2013 made this level of precision possible.

“Using the out-of-box web parts and display templates in SharePoint 2013, we were able to save SAM a lot of money, because we had to create very few custom

web parts,” Yglesias says. “Also, we designed the site with a search-driven architecture using SharePoint search, so performance is really great.”

The search-driven architecture also helps keep the site consistent and up-to-date. Previously, if a museum staff person wanted to change something that appeared multiple times on the site, such as museum hours, the web team had to make a change-request to IT, and IT had to manually find every page where the information appeared and make the change. Now, the team makes the change once and it is updated everywhere it appears on the site.

From an overall design perspective, the new site celebrates the museum’s art far better than the old site did. “Art images can be any shape or size; they don’t have to be squeezed into a rigid box,” Schroer says. “With powerful images, we’re able to give site visitors a better representation of our exhibitions, collections, public programs, and events. All the pages are visually rich, not just the home page.”

Buildingi used responsive design techniques so that the site automatically formats to the screen size of the device on which it is being viewed. This ensures that smartphone and tablet users have just as great an experience on the site as PC users have, using features such as touch and slide interface gestures.

The SAM website runs on a farm of five SharePoint servers that run the Windows Server 2012 Datacenter operating system. All the servers are virtualized using Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V technology and clustered for failover and high availability. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 data

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Its previous web foundation limited SAM to unimaginative layouts (above) while SharePoint Server lets it create more interesting web pages (below) that better highlight its exhibitions.

management software stores business applications to which the website connects.

The new SAM site launched in February 2014. The museum is investigating other ways that it can use its SharePoint 2013 investment, such as upgrading its intranet and internal collaboration sites.

BenefitsBy building its redesigned website with SharePoint 2013, the Seattle Art Museum has been able to create a visually stunning online destination that showcases its art, is simpler to navigate, and entices website visitors to visit the museum. The museum anticipates that the new site will contribute to increased museum ticket sales, donations, and sponsors. And because the site is easier to update and maintain, information on the site is fresher.

Beautiful, Easy-to-Use WebsiteOn the new SAM website, visitors can easily find what they’re looking for, make the transaction they want to make, and get a sneak peek at the art waiting for them in the museum. “SAM strives to be an innovator in the museum field, and you can’t do that with a clunky 12-year-old website,” Egan says. “SharePoint 2013 really helps us showcase the Seattle Art Museum experience in a beautiful and compelling way.”

SAM website visitors now enjoy a consistent experience wherever they roam on the site and no longer find themselves jettisoned to microsites that look and feel completely different from the main site. This reduces confusion and frustration and supports longer site dwell time and better overall engagement.

Potential for Enhanced Attendance, Revenue Generation

SAM anticipates that the vastly improved web experience will translate to more museum visitors, donations, and corporate support. “We have a large board with some very distinguished members from local technology companies,” Schroer says. “With a more tech-savvy website, we hope to gain more respect and support from these companies.”

SAM believes that a more inviting site will engender more support from the rest of the community, too. “When 90 percent of the people coming to your site are dropping off after just a few seconds, it is difficult to generate new members, visitors, or donations,” Egan says. “With a site that is so much more engaging, there’s a much greater chance that people will stick around and even support us. On a practical level, there are far fewer clicks required now to buy a ticket or donate.”

Yglesias adds another practical example: “By making the site fully accessible from mobile devices, people walking down the street looking for something to do on a Saturday afternoon can pull up the SAM mobile site, become really intrigued by what they see, and decide spur of the moment to visit the museum. These are moments of opportunity to engage the public that SAM just didn’t have before.”

Maintenance Ease Keeps Site FreshThe IT department is no longer the site gatekeeper; creative content owners like Schroer and Egan can make changes themselves, and do so in minutes versus the days it took IT before. “About 15 power users can make changes to the site, though we want to maintain control over our branding so we won’t expand much beyond that group—with even fewer having permission to change the home page,” Schroer says. “Still, easy updating

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“With a site that is so much more engaging, there’s a much greater chance that people will stick around and even support us.”

Cara Egan, Director of Public Relations and Marketing, Seattle Art Museum

ensures that our site is far more accurate and up-to-date. Our website is a smoothly working part of our museum team now.”

SharePointSharePoint is the new way to work together. A simplified user experience helps you organize, sync, and share all your content. New social capabilities make it easy to share ideas, keep track of what your colleagues are working on, and discover experts you never knew existed.

For more information go to:www.sharepoint.microsoft.com

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Buildingi services, visit the website at: www.buildingi.com

For more information about Hornall Anderson services, visit the website at: www.hornallanderson.com

For more information about Seattle Art Museum, visit the website at: www.seattleartmuseum.org

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published April 2014

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Windows Server 2012 Datacenter− Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013− Microsoft SQL Server 2012

Technologies− Business Connectivity Services in

SharePoint 2013− Hyper-V

Hardware HP ProLiant DL380 servers

Partners Buildingi Hornall Anderson