Historic Royal Palaces is the charity which preserves the stories and buildings of five of the greatest palaces ever built: the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, the Banqueting House, Kensington Palace and Kew Palace. They had a requirement for a market-leading website to be developed that would showcase their cause and also deliver on their commercial requirements. The new site needed to meet a range of criteria which will ensure that the overriding Principles, Key Objectives and Brand are delivered to the online audience. Within this, the site will also need to conform to the following mandatory criteria: creativity; inspiration, production values, usability, accessibility, and information architecture.
• Create a site that supported the 50 user personas and was user centric.
• Tell a range of stories which help people explore how monarchs and people shaped society, in some of the greatest palaces ever built
• Drive visitors and revenue through the online channel, integrating with their existing eticketing provider and separate ecommerce solution
• Increase Historic Royal Palaces presence in the wider world
• Deliver Level A accessibility as a minimum
The site launched on 4th April 2007 with over 800 pages of content, phase 1 of the eticketing integration and the online shop pulling related products on to relevant pages throughout the site. Initial feedback has been very positive from both their 30 strong internal project team and their visitors.
In the short time since its launch, the website has already picked up a W3 Gold Award, given by the International Academy for the Visual Arts.
Enriching the on line experience continues to be paramount to Historic Royal Palaces' aim to convert their virtual visitors to real time ones. GraphicoDMG has enhanced the site recently, adding a media player (supported by a database of visual and audio recordings) to the website and Palace Connections, a trail building capability enabling the visitor to uncover links between different palaces, either via events in their history or through the intertwining of the lives of key personalities and their associations with these royal buildings.