Port Discovery Children's Museum Website Design

Port Discovery Children’s Museum is located in downtown Baltimore, near the Inner Harbor tourist and business district. It is a non-profit that carefully curates play and learning opportunities designed to help children and their caregivers learn about themselves, build connections to others, and engage with the world around them.

Each year, Port Discovery serves hundreds of thousands of visitors in the Museum and through programs in the community. The Museum is ranked among the top 10 Children’s Museums in the United States, and it is one of the top four most visited museums in Baltimore, Maryland.

Propr Agency partnered with Port Discovery to refresh its brand strategy, update brand assets, and redesign the Museum website to support its operations and target audience. This Case Study focuses on the challenges, objectives, solutions, and results of the Museum’s website project.

Download the Museum Website Case Study

Port Discovery Children’s Museum came to the table with detailed analytics and customer feedback, revealing how existing and potential customers were underutilizing the museum’s website. They found it challenging to find core Museum information, such as ticket types and prices, operating hours, location, parking, and amenities. Information about current events was not intuitively accessible to the user, nor did the design accommodate Port Discovery’s enthusiasm to promote special events and education programs.

From a technical perspective, the old museum website design had not been optimized for mobile traffic, even though over 80% of its visitors are on mobile devices. The site needed to be accessible, load faster, and be easier to navigate on mobile. These user difficulties resulted in high bounce rates and a high volume of customer service calls to answer basic questions such as museum hours. 

Port Discovery’s old website design inhibited multiple operational workflows; it was difficult to update, confusing, and extremely time-consuming to maintain. Additionally, it was built on an antiquated platform that is no longer supported.

Download the Museum Website Case Study

Port Discovery’s pursuits for the new website design aligned with two primary objectives:

1. The need to better serve the Museums’ customers and 
2. A solution that enables Port Discovery’s team with an efficient, useful tool to help support their mission. 

Working with Port Discovery’s marketing and communications leaders, we defined the specifications for these primary objectives.

Serve Port Discovery’s Customers

The Museum needed a new website design to deliver a better user experience. To accomplish this, our teams set out to:

1. Expand Accessibility
2. Provide Information & Education
3. Optimize the User Journey
4. Improve Messaging
5. Serve the Correct Audience

Support Port Discovery’s Mission

Port Discovery’s growth was partially inhibited by an inflexible museum website design that wasn’t designed with operational objectives in mind, so it was paramount that Propr Agency deliver a solution that operationalized the Museum’s digital property. 

1. Increase/Improve Lead Generation & Conversion
2. Streamline Workflows & Save Time
3. Grow Mission Awareness

Download the Museum Website Case Study

Download the Museum Website Design Case Study