The Other Media creates new V&A website

The Victoria & Albert Museum is unveiling a new website today, designed by The Other Media, which will present collections as an encyclopedic resource and offer a more visual online organisation.

Appointed through a five-way pitch in July 2009, the consultancy was also asked to accommodate user-generated content and consider how the site could best deliver clear, but content-rich pages for visitors who land on the site through search engines.

The V&A says the majority of the previous website’s users came to the site through search engines. The Other Media managing director George Crabb says the new site will assemble archive and related content on a landing page, ’where users can drill down into further opportunities’.

The site’s main audience comprises academics, people needing to research design and people planning a day out, according to Crabb, who says the consultancy had to answer the question, ’How do you express the range and complexity of the V&A to different audiences?’

A new look is led by larger images on the front section of the site and there is more opportunity to integrate different kinds of media because of a modular approach. ’Each page draws you in further and we’re trying to encourage a continuous user journey,’ says Crabb.

User-generated content will be accommodated on the new site. According to V&A head of online museum Gail Durbin, the V&A website hosts the most user-generated content of any museum globally.

Projects include the global World Beach page and dedicated areas for tattoos, wedding dresses and 1960s fashion all of which encourage user interaction and relate to current exhibitions.

Conversation will continue to be encouraged between visitors, but in a way which brings in more content from across the Web, according to Durbin.