Glazer Children’s Museum
Building a whimsical, functional website for families who are here to play.
Downtown Tampa’s Glazer Children’s Museum is one of the top museums for children in the nation. The expansive, interactive space is built entirely around play, with exhibits that welcome children of all ages to immerse themselves in science, culture, and art.
Glazer came to Big Sea with a website that was over a decade old. It had many of the issues we see with aging websites: an overabundance of content, confusing navigation, lack of responsiveness, and rigid templates. On the flip side, Glazer had everything in place to launch a successful partnership. They came to the table with a well-developed brand and an engaged, talented team of creatives and marketers.
Together, we identified their must-haves, recognizing the fact that a children’s museum website can’t simply be fun and colorful. It must be accessible, fast, flexible, and easy for busy parents to navigate — especially on the phone. Glazer’s team also needed the ability to publish new pages and events themselves without waiting on a designer and developer for routine changes.
We kicked off the project with a museum tour that made us want to be kids again, and then we hit the ground running!
WordPress-powered, parent-approved.
Translating a visual brand into an accessible design language
Big Sea worked directly with the museum’s creative director throughout the design process, identifying accessible color combinations and fonts to ensure compliance without diluting a mature brand. Strategic design choices allowed us to retain Glazer’s sense of whimsy without creating challenges for someone reading a screen in the bright Florida sun, accessing the site via a screen reader, or loading it on a phone while pushing a stroller.
Accessibility is about more than compliance. It’s about empathizing with users. In Glazer’s case, we needed to ensure that a parent holding a squirming toddler could find crucial information like hours of operation as quickly as possible. Every design decision accounted for both compliance and someone being pulled in four different directions at once.
Rebuilding the foundation for a fresh start and a clean user experience
Information architecture and content pruning: We rebuilt Glazer’s sitemap from the ground up, cutting outdated and duplicate pages and making sure high-traffic items like Membership lived in one clear place instead of scattered across the navigation.
Updated navigation: Using a collaborative card sorting exercise, we reworked Glazer’s navigation, creating clearer and more intuitive pathways to key content.
Strategic content design: We consolidated hours, parking, and directions into a single page built to answer the questions that used to land in the contact form. The page is structured both for ease of human use and to ensure that Glazer shows up in AI-assisted search.
Fun and functionality
Fast, mobile-first redesign: Big Sea designed and developed mobile-first, with a focus on high-traffic paths such as finding hours and location, buying tickets, and browsing the many events Glazer Children’s Museum hosts every week.
Branded details built into the design system: With access to a robust style guide, our job was to identify opportunities for playful touches without over-complicating the design or getting in the way of functionality. We used colors, shapes and scale to create a digital experience that mirrors the feeling you get when you walk in the door of Glazer Children’s Museum’s beautiful building.
Nimble website features that empower museum marketers
Accessible color system and built-in tools: We audited the museum’s brand palette against WCAG contrast standards and built a reference guide showing which colors could pair together and where. To better reach Glazer’s audiences, we leveraged Google Translate for English and Spanish and installed an accessibility widget
Self-service exhibit and event system: Using custom Gutenberg blocks in WordPress, we created a system that allows the museum’s team to easily publish new exhibit and event pages themselves. We customized the Event Calendar to match the museum’s playful brand, using color as a thoughtful key.
Elegant touches purpose-built for busy parents
Field trip forecast: Glazer Children’s Museum excels at welcoming all families. We built a custom tool that shows parents when large school groups from Hillsborough County are scheduled to visit, so families, including parents of neurodivergent kids who need to plan around crowd size, can choose the best day to play.
Summer camp spotlight: Summer camps and school break camps are a cornerstone of what Glazer offers the community. We gave the museum’s camps their own dedicated space on the site instead of keeping them buried under general programs.
A children’s museum website that helps parents plan the perfect day
Glazer Children’s Museum’s creative team now has a documented, accessible way to use their own brand colors online, something that didn’t exist before this project. Their content team can publish new exhibits, events, and camp sessions without submitting a dev ticket. A parent checking hours from a phone in the parking lot gets a fast, direct answer instead of a slow homepage. And families looking for camp options can easily get the information they need and register.
