Black Country Living Museum is one of the UK’s most celebrated open-air museums, bringing the history of the Black Country to life across a vast outdoor site in Dudley, West Midlands. With a visitor offer spanning tickets, ecommerce, membership, donations, venue hire, schools, a growing collection, and a profile supercharged by its role as a Peaky Blinders filming location, the museum needed a digital platform that could serve all areas of the organisation.
Neil Lewin, owner of Semantic explains how his team worked with the museum to come up with a digital solution that would work for diverse audiences, address every touchpoint of the visitor journey, and capitalise on commercial opportunity.
The Challenge
Black Country Living Museum’s visitor offer is genuinely complex. Day tickets, annual passes, group bookings, school trips, memberships, donations, merchandise, venue hire, weddings, filming enquiries, and a busy seasonal events calendar. On top of that, a responsibility to be the go-to digital source for Black Country history. That is a lot to ask of any website.
The Solution
LOOP by Semantic has given Black Country Living Museum a clean, structured platform with the flexibility to serve multiple audiences at once. Ticketing links out to Fusemetrix, along with further call-to-actions for donations, memberships, and the online shop. The events and what’s on section keeps a busy calendar manageable for the team. The Peaky Blinders content has its own dedicated home, capitalising on one of the most powerful awareness drivers the museum has.
- Mobile-first design built for a diverse visitor audience
- Clean separation of visitor journeys – families, heritage enthusiasts, schools, venue hirers
- Call-to-actions for ticketing, donations and memberships woven into the visitor flow
- Easy intuitive CMS for the BCLM team to manage content, visitor information and events programming
- Dedicated Peaky Blinders section capitalising on major cultural profile
- Opening times and live alert messaging updated without developer support
- SEO-optimised architecture supporting Black Country Living Museum’s authority on Black Country history
- Accessible, fast, and built for a public-facing heritage organisation
The Result
A website that works for every audience Black Country Living Museum serves, and a platform that can scale with them with more sites, brands and components to bring the experience to life.
Sam Davies, Systems & Process Partner at Black Country Living Museum said:
“Launching our brand new website with LOOP by Semantic has been a genuinely positive experience from start to finish. The implementation and go-live were impressively smooth, with Semantic leading the project clearly and confidently all the way through. For a small team, that kind of support makes a huge difference.
“LOOP is built specifically for visitor attractions, and it really shows. It does exactly what it needs to do without overcomplicating things, which means we can stay focused on what matters. Day to day, that’s content. The platform is intuitive, easy to navigate, and straightforward to update, which has made ongoing management far less of a burden than we might have expected.
“Go-live was a success, and since then, maintaining and evolving the site has been refreshingly manageable. A big thank you to the team at Semantic for their partnership and support throughout.”
Take a look: Black Country Living Museum
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