Website Mission: Introduce the new Conservatory and garden to the public as inviting and vibrant. Promote upcoming events, create a stunning digital presence, and document the Friends' decade of advocacy and programming.
The real labor here was crafting a new narrative.
Instead of petition, lobby, build—the necessary story the Friends told ourselves and others during our ten-year campaign—the story arc shifted. We highlighted new opportunities (and verbs) in our main website navigation bar. EXPLORE, visit, listen, rent, contact, search. Alive, animated, and inviting was the desired mood. Our goal: spur visitors and a new generation of stewards.
Our other key design decision: go visual, in a big way, letting the gorgeous palms, succulents, rich palette, and other visuals shine. Thus, the spare, almost miminalist design. The Conservatory and garden is the story. The other design benefit: the powerful quality of exploration, so central to thoughtful landscape design where surprises await and unfold around a bend, or up a few steps. The main pages of the website offer a rich "photo album." Yet, we layered depth underneath simplicity. Scroll over any picture and a "story in words" unfolds. Lastly, we linked to various flickr streams, blogs, and posts that showed the Conservatory working its magic on smitten visitors and included an audio player so folks could listen for themselves to the Live @ Conservatory Concert series.