Website of Maxim Bagdanovich
Museum in Grodno

Launched August 17, 2016

What is the project about?

The site was created as a social and advertising project of the studio. We discussed our company's marketing plans for the following year and came across a great idea: why not develop a website that will demonstrate our professional competences to the full? We started to work over this idea. As a result, we decided to develop free of change a website that will bring about benefits to the Belarusian culture or our native city. We made a list of organizations we would like to collaborate with, and, in the end, we chose the Maxim Bagdanovich Museum in Grodno.

Problematic Area

Many travelers use the Internet while planning their trips. The museum practically did not use this means in promoting its services. On the Internet, there was not enough information that could attract travelers to visit the museum.

Goals and Objectives

We define the main goals of the site:

to advertise the museum services on the Internet;
to promote the works of Maxim Bagdanovich.

We decided to create a site where visitors could obtain the most complete information about the museum and its services, book a tour as well as get acquainted with the works of this outstanding writer.

Prototyping

We thought over the interface of the future site. On the desktop, we decided to make the navigation that would resembles “moving” within just one large page. On mobile devices, we employed only a common page reloading in order to increase the site speed on smartphones.

Design

At first, we gathered the content to build up a site around it. Then we structured the information, selected the media content and carried out a photo shoot of the museum mexposition.

The entire content was divided into two groups: the first one was related to the museum, the second one was devoted to the life and works of Maxim Bagdanovich. They determined the structure of the main menu, which was also divided into two parts.

On the Home Page, visitors can quickly get the basic information about the museum and its services.

In order to convey the atmosphere of the museum, we decided to fill up the site with the photo content even before the start of the project. The “Cyclorama” script was worked out especially for the “Exposure” section. It presents the expositions in the 360-degree format.

The commercial aspect of the project was not ignored, either. Site visitors can conveniently book tours, lectures and thematic classes, and immediately find out the costs of services.

In the block dedicated to the life and works of Maxim Bagdanovich, visitors can find poems, stories and translations of the writer.

The writer’s biography was brightly presented in the timeline.

The site is convenient to visit while using mobile devices, as it is responsive.

Programming

In order to implement the responsiveness, the developer did not use the framework, but wrote the custom code to increase the site speed on mobile devices. Other techniques were used for the same reason, e.g., loading images of different sizes for the corresponding screen sizes of devices.

The site backend is built on the Yii framework, which also made it run faster. Unlike the ready-made CMS, the framework has no extra functionality, which significantly makes the work of the content manager simpler.

The site runs on PHP 7.0 and uses a secure connection with the https protocol.

Results

A great number of people found out about the site for the first two days after its launch. The link to the site was shared over 200 times. We did not even count republications — they turned out much more numerous.

The work resulted in an evident success. Therefore, we decided to turn a one-time initiative into a long-lasting project and to launch annually a new website that would promote the Belarusian culture.

The website is available at:

bagdanovichmuseum.by

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