Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Content strategy, style guide, content segmentation, launch and migration strategy and preparation

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia exhibits the works of some of the most interesting and provocative contemporary artists in Australia. It wants everyone to experience and understand that art, its looks after a large art collection, and has a strong commitment to collaborating with and celebrating indigenous artists and communities.

It was decided that the MCA website needed to reflect all of these things, and so began a comprehensive update project – new design, technology, IA and content.

Happy Content signed up as content partner – as content strategist, determiner of online content voice and style, accessibility champion, content advocate throughout the design and technology development processes, content revision strategist, writer, producer, reviewer and coach.

We discovered rich content (lots of it) and some great new opportunities, a staff busy with their core business and also managing web content with varying results, a mixed understanding of writing for the web, and a lack of any editorial overview or governance. We talked to a lot of people, found our content evangelists, listened to everyone’s ideas and informed the work of the clever developers and design partners.

Launched in February 2018, the new MCA website features bold new designs (by Pollen) better suited to the rich, visual content. Content is managed in a CMS that is powerful and easy to use. Authors have comprehensive content guidelines to use as reference while they are writing. There’s a fabulous new web editor sitting in the MCA digital team dreaming up new ideas and stories and overseeing content quality. And the breadth and expertise of the MCA is truly on show to a global audience – more stories, more voices, more artworks in the collection, more interesting ideas shared.

And, most importantly, the user experience is greatly improved – nav labels are intuitive, content is consistent, written for the web and in plain English, links suggest interesting relevant topics to explore, and images have alt text and captions.