Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Cleveland
Museum of
Natural History
www.cmnh.org
Background
The Cleveland Museum of Natural History (CMNH) features over four million
specimens of archeology, astronomy, geology, zoology, wildlife biology, and more.
Looking to refresh its web presence, CMNH chose thunder::tech to design and develop
a new responsive website.
Goals
The goals for the new CMNH website included improving the users experience on the
site, both for ticket purchasing and while visiting the museum. Also, to drive
membership enrollment and increase donations made online.
Challenges
Industry
Education
Partner
thunder::tech
3635 Perkins Ave., Studio 5 SW
Cleveland, Ohio 44114
www.thundertech.com
thunder::tech needed to identify the museum’s most important content and how to
display it so users can easily access the information. This content included visitor hours,
calendar of events and current exhibits, and how to donate. Other items that CMNH
was in need of for the new website were the creation of a blog, custom maps, custom
events, and news tools with the ability for instant updating from the Museum faculty in
a CMS.
Solution
Kentico CMS Ultimate license was the perfect framework to meet all of the CMNH
project’s needs. thunder::tech’s User Experience designers and front-end developers
created customized and engaging responsive templates, designed to drive conversions
as defined in the website goals. The Kentico APIs and framework were leveraged to
integrate the Tessitura software, allowing ticketing and customer information
synchronization across systems and improving visitor experiences during checkout.
More interactive features that
demonstrated the capabilities of
both Kentico and thunder::tech’s
front-end developers were the
photo gallery, interactive site
map, events calendar, and a
historical timeline of the
museum through time.
Results
Once all the templates and workflows were configured, training
was conducted in-person. The staff and editors at the Museum
learned how to use the custom and standard Kentico widgets
and web parts to manage and publish content. With a new
responsive website, CMNH saw an increase in pages per session
(16.67%) and average session duration (14.39%). Bounce rates
decreased by 15.81% and average page download time dropped
a drastic 87.18%. Kentico CMS, with intuitive workflows and
configuration, allowed for faster and more effective publishing of
engaging content for exhibits, events, news, and exciting
scientific discoveries.
Key criteria for selecting Kentico
The CMS needed to accommodate integration within the e-commerce checkout
process for custom products fed in from an external system and framework,
Tessitura. Kentico also enabled a diverse set of categorization and cross-linking that
provided an immersive and thoughtful experience across all devices. Finally, the CMS
dashboard needed to be intuitive and friendly for all skill levels of the editors.