Royal Tyrrell Museum

RealDecoy sent a proposal to the Museum to redevelop its website after being recommended by our partner RedDot. Our proposal beat out seven other finalists.

THE CHALLENGE

To set new standards of excellence

Redeveloping its website posed a number of challenges to the Museum.

• First, it had trouble organizing its web content and establishing a balance between the various content types and audiences. 
• Second, the Museum had a mandate to move the site to a Government of Alberta infrastructure based around Opentexts’ RedDot CMS, and 
• Third, the museum wanted to set a standard of excellence in the online museum community.

All about location

The Museum also faced a particularly unique challenge from the day it was built: visitors have to drive to near Drumheller, Alberta—a very rural area—just to get to it. It was important that the website provide a lot of visitor information and suggest activities a typical family could take in during a full day at the museum. After all, nobody wants to drive a long distance only to find out there’s nothing to do when they arrive.

Integrating multiple programs and accommodating multiple stakeholders

The Museum also focuses heavily on programs—for example, fun projects that allow families to excavate for dinosaur bones—that it offers during the summer months as well as during the school year. These programs, however, have an e-commerce component managed by two third-party sources. This made the idea of integrating these programs into the website particularly daunting: the integration would have to satisfy other partners as well as the Museum.

The Museum’s Cooperating Society, a third party separate from the Museum, managed the institution’s gift shop. The Society’s website was hosted externally from the Museum’s website and was not going to be integrated with the Museum’s site.

OUR SOLUTION

Getting to know the Royal Tyrrell Museum

To get a better understanding of the Royal Tyrrell Museum, RealDecoy sent its senior web strategist, Erik Hagborg, to spend two weeks at the Museum to gain insight and a better understanding of the Museum’s culture, priorities and operations. At the same time, he took in the area around Drumheller to get a better sense of the locale and find inspiration for the Museum’s site.

We took an iterative approach to planning the new site, working closely with the museum staff and taking the time to understand both the museum and its audiences.

RealDecoy worked closely with the Museum during this time to ensure that the website would address all of its business needs. We built a lasting relationship with the Museum and continue to support it on various projects today.

Developing the site

RealDecoy developed a site that met the Museum’s needs. Notably, the website provided:

• visitor information
• program information (a very important aspect of the Royal Tyrrell Museum)
• an engaging demonstration of the Museum’s permanent and temporary exhibits 
• integrated content from the Museum’s collection 
• forms for dealing with numerous inquires about fossils, collecting, viewing and digging in Alberta

RealDecoy also developed numerous custom elements for the Museum’s website, including:

• a custom list editor for RedDot CMS to facilitate management of content on the site
• a skin for third-party applications 
• the integration of various third-party e-commerce systems and databases such as HERMIS, the Government of Alberta’s digital collection database, into the website.

The result has been a website that has received much praise from both the Museum and its visitors for its simple yet easy to use approach.

The Museum wanted an interactive and dynamic method of navigating some of its dinosaur content that would appeal to both youth and adult audiences.

THE CHALLENGE

As part of the redesign of the Museum’s website, it was determined that an interactive piece should be integrated into the home page to feature key information about palaeontology and some interesting facts and features from the Museum. This would give the Museum the power to present value-added content about dinosaurs on the home page of the website. The content spanned some 300 million years and wasn’t evenly distributed, which meant that any “timeline” would have a bit of content between 1870 to 2009 and lots of content spread out between 120 million and 65 million years ago.  Not an easy scale to work with.

OUR SOLUTION

A fun and engaging navigation tool

RealDecoy built a fun and educational timeline that presented accurate and scientific content. By using landscapes reflecting different geographic eras that visitors could scroll over to navigate, RealDecoy was able to create a side scrolling timeline that effectively spanned the 300 million years between the Carboniferous Period and present day. Users can explore the periods clicking on animated dinosaurs to find out more while being guided by Joseph Burr Tyrrell, the geologist who first found dinosaur fossils in Alberta’s badlands.

The timeline is built in Flash and integrated into RedDot CMS allowing the museum to update content on the timeline through the same tool they use to manage the rest of the site.

“RealDecoy offers a superb and comprehensive suite of web services. Highly experienced in web design, content management systems, project management and customer service, they know their business and truly understand the museum community.

They are exacting, expeditious and gracious in their style. Their team took the time to understand our need to ‘standout from the crowd’ creatively, while maintaining accessibility and yet, still discover new ways to get our content across innovatively. Throughout the entire project they continued to work closely with us to ensure our needs were met.”

Lisa Making
Head, Strategic Initiatives
Royal Tyrrell Museum