DeCordova Sculpture Park + Museum

Information Architecture and Website Redesign


Summer 2009  |  www.decordova.org

We redesigned The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park's website to give users a clear tool to interface with the Museum. When we began, their old site suffered from a small canvas and overgrown navigation. In our meetings with the staff we listened to how they wanted their visitors to interact with the site. We rearchitected the site into distinct verticals based on these goals. What before was a confusing 15-item navigation became 5 clear sections.

We also introduced a cleaner look with a wider canvas that give the Museum more latitude to promote content and highlight the artwork.

In the redesign, we pared down the content to five basic content types and developed an information architecture to support them. We organized pages underneath this fly-out navigation so content never be more than one-click away for a user.

Inside Pages

The interior sections are marked by bold but unadorned photography that spans the top of each page. The lower portion offers flexible configuration options so the same template can function for the support, school and store pages.