A flexible solution to empower the Arts Council and arts organisations across England

About Arts Council England

Arts Council supports activities across England in arts, museums and libraries. Their website serves as an authority in arts and culture, and provides a space for job listings and community blogs. 

Between 2018 and 2022, The Arts Council invested £1.33 billion of public money from the government, and an estimated £300 million from the National Lottery, to help create art and culture experiences for everyone, everywhere.  Between 2023 and 2026,  the Arts Council will be investing £445 million each year in 985 organisations including music venues, galleries, museums, arts centres, libraries and more.

Their website acts as a secure hub for groups to apply for this funding and helps groups around the country to realise their potential.

In 2024, Arts Council England will have been a CTI Digital client for 10 years.

Business Challenge

Arts Council’s website and CMS capability didn’t afford the control and flexibility they required. The rigid website content management system meant that editors were unable to tailor the structure and content on web pages in order to communicate their messages effectively.

Therefore, over the 3-month project, we focused on delivering two main areas of improvement:

1. Increasing control, for Arts Council to edit their website

To do this we needed to:

• Augment the existing CMS, enabling greater flexibility
• Empower content managers, with more freedom to edit text and video

2. Improving user experience, when visiting the site

To do this we needed to:

• Update the menu navigation
• Organise content to be best available for users’ needs

Flexible Content Management System

Through Continual Development, we implemented a new flexible modular component-based CMS. This provides more control for the content managers at Arts Council.

Drupal’s modular content management system utilises paragraphs that allow editors to create text, embed videos, images and more. The component-based design removes barriers to entry for contributing to the website. It also removes the need for coding knowledge when editing content on web pages, and reduces dependency upon developers, allowing clients to keep publishing in-house.

With Drupal’s native support for capturing content in a structured manner through Content Types, serving fields tailored to suit, we created content types for the new Landing page and Homepage, with the later addition of a Blog Landing Page. 

These provided the skeleton for a basic page, including elements like: title, introduction and URL. Beyond that, to deliver maximum flexibility for content editors to ‘build’ compelling and interesting pages, whilst maintaining brand integrity, we provided the ability to assemble pages from a set of available component styles.

• Home Page Gallery
• Showcase
• Double spotlight
• Featured content
• Full Text
• Header
• Navigation Spotlights
• Navigation Spotlights List
• Quick links
• Slides
• Spotlight element

Each component type can be added to a page any number of times, in any order. Additional components can be developed in the future as the organisations content requirements adapt and change. These guides help content editors to publish in-house while complying with accessibility and usability standards almost subconsciously.

User-Centred Navigation

We take a user-centric approach to all of our projects. To create a navigation structure that delights users, it must be built with them in mind. Therefore, we asked almost 100 everyday stakeholders of Arts Council to take part in creating the navigation. We used Card Sorting and Tree Tests to find out what users expected from the navigation and applied their opinions to best practices, ultimately creating the best navigation for everyone.

Individuals were asked to journey through the existing navigation in order to reach specific pieces of information; this is called Tree Testing. 

We investigated which areas they clicked on the most, how successful they were at finding the information, and how often they had to backtrack to find the information. 

Card Sorting was then used to give insight into how users structure information in their own mental models. Users were asked to sort cards containing the topics on Art Councils navigation, to discover what areas they associated with each other. 

As a result, we were able to discover which topics were most often associated with other groups and which topics were considered too similar. This also provided insight to review the names of topics where their purpose was often misconstrued.

In addition to providing the premise of the global site navigation, these activities also presented the basis for the on-page navigation.

We implemented three forms of on-page navigation, to function as a secondary aid to the global navigation. On each page, content managers can set the following criteria, to help users get the most out of their visit:

• The breadcrumbs of the page

• The content spotlights

• The footer carousel

Scalable Support During High Traffic

Mid-year, Arts Council release the successful funding grants for the next period causing a potential influx of traffic. We implemented a scalable, cloud-based hosting solution to provide Arts Council with extra support during these times of peak traffic. The solution will scale up virtual instances during peak trading periods and scale them down again automatically, with zero downtime.