Tampa Bay History Center

A new website brings resources to light for a regional history museum.

The Tampa Bay History Center is a Smithsonian Affiliate history museum on the waterfront in Tampa’s Channelside district devoted to the history of Tampa Bay, Florida, and the Gulf Coast more broadly. The 60,000 sq. ft. facility boasts three floors of permanent and temporary exhibition space and features an event hall, a map gallery, and the Witt Research Center.

In 2022, Big Sea began working with the History Center to make its website easier to navigate and more user-friendly. Our particular focus was on information architecture and content governance.

Web Design & Development
Strategy & Consulting

Our Objectives

Our goals were to

Highlight the museum’s most outstanding resources and make those resources easier to understand and access via the History Center’s homepage.
Build new modular templates for WordPress that would allow museum staff to create new pages for the site as needed.
Restructure the website’s homepage and build out basic information sections such as the FAQ, the location page, and a page for planning your visit.

The Problem

Making an important resource visible online

Improving user experience

With more than 100,000 in-person visitors per year, the Tampa Bay History Center draws tourists, families, school visits, and guests of all ages. But it also houses resources such as the Witt Research Center and the Touchton Map Library that are of special interest to specialist scholars studying Tampa Bay, Florida, and the greater Gulf Coast region. Before working with Big Sea, information about many of these resources was present online but not easily accessible from the homepage.

Developing content governance

The Tampa Bay History Center’s website lives on WordPress, but the site’s administrators needed tools and templates for creating new pages as needed. The organization also needed to establish procedures for content governance so that new pages could be added to the site without cluttering of confusing the basic architecture of the homepage and the website’s major sections.

The Strategy

Restructuring the website for future ease of use and development

Big Sea worked with the Tampa Bay History Center to restructure its website with two goals in mind:

1. Restructuring the site to make it more user-friendly, especially for teachers and homeschoolers who were accessing it far more frequently during the height of Covid; and

2. Developing templates that would allow site administrators to build new pages more easily while also establishing a procedure for ordering new content as it was produced and uploaded.

Through web development work, the creation of a new site wireframe, and the establishment of new organizational protocols for future web maintenance and development, Big Sea helped relaunch the Tampa Bay History Center’s website.

The Results

Thanks to their new website, the History Center saw an increase in ticket sales for the museum, a boost to overall web traffic, as well as a decrease in bounce rates. The new homepage prominently features links to the center’s major resources as well as pages that help site visitors plan an in-person trip.

“Big Sea's approach makes collaboration easy. This was a true partnership between our in-house marketing team and this digital agency. We would not have been able to launch this website on deadline without Big Sea's open communication, clear expectations, and experience marketing nonprofit organizations and museums. Honestly, it was smooth sailing throughout the entire project.” — Billy Somerville, Director of Marketing & Communications, Tampa Bay History Center