The Batavia Gallery is the centrepiece of the WA Shipwrecks Museum, exhibiting the restored remains of the ship and its cargo, now artefacts, for members of the public to appreciate. The Museum attracts a wide range of visitors, including international tourists, interstate and local travellers as well as school groups and families.
This web design project was developed for the Batavia Gallery microsite which is a part of the WA Shipwrecks Museum in Fremantle. The project brief summarised user feedback that complained of unstructured content, incomplete information, distracting visuals and boring design. The redesign was aimed at resolving these issues with a distinct look and feel from the main site, as requested in the brief, with the intention to create greater engagement, improve the readability and navigation of the site structure and to direct in-person traffic to the museum.
Designing to engage adults and children alike is a challenge whose answer lies in the research. Developing an understanding of the users makes the greatest difference to any project because it allows us to design with purpose and strategy.
Investigating personas from every angle known to man, consolidating the research into value propositions, empathy maps and journey maps, the direction of the project took hold and it became clear as to the goals the website needed to achieve. Confirming the client's concerns with the true root of the problem meant the project would be failsafe, provided the goals were at the forefront of every decision.
As a step closer to the solution, I designed a dark, underwater themed website, utilising photography from the gallery itself to engage users and set them on a journey to explore a little-known part of history. Aimed at meeting the needs of users whilst creating a distinct look and feel from the main site, I tailored the user experience to the target audience, created clear structure and visual hierarchy and implemented SEO strategies using extensive research and analysis. The end result was three website pages implemented into WordPress with full responsiveness to work on all devices.
As the second website I’ve designed and coded, understanding the implications of each decision and how text, images and elements will work together in HTML and CSS was a really important takeaway. In addition, I found designing responsive websites means giving thought to how those elements will scale at different sizes without creating friction in the user experience. I have a lot of improvement still to go.
With a longer timeline I would have further developed the other pages, properly implemented blog posts in WordPress to be connected with each other, and added animation to the content to create a more dynamic and interactive experience for visitors to the site. I would also revisit the dark theme and try to create a more convincing underwater aesthetic, perhaps utilising background video or other animations to give a more waterlike appearance with interactions occurring as the user scrolls further.
