Last week we launched the long anticipated Planetarium website (opens new window). The site is a complete 180 from their old site.

As you can see from the screen shots above the sites are dramatically different visually. We also included many dynamic features and simplified the navigation to ensure visitors find what they are looking for.

Updating the look

During the life of this project the physical planetarium was going through an overhaul. The original planetarium was build in 1955 (opens new window), then renovated in 1996 with the renovation of the building and was recently upgraded to include the newest digital projector technology. They came to the marketing department with the need to update their logo and give them a visual presence on the Web and print that matched their new physical look.

As a first step in the project we sat down with the department head and figured out everything the planetarium has to offer, what their prospective and current visitors are looking for, and came up with additional ideas that would benefit the department. This lead to a homepage that had many more features than the previous website. We organized them into News, Events, Show Schedule, and Promotions. Some of the promotions stay up year round while others rotate out depending on the time of year.

It was important for us to give the look of the site something that was not only inspiring but also lead visitors in to learn more. Since it is tough to take photos of the audience while the planetarium shows were going on we opted for photos of the actual sky.

An abundance of information

From the people we surveyed we discovered a great majority either didn't know we had a planetarium or didn't know the extent of what they offered, we set out to change that. The fact that most of the events are free also made people step back. The planetarium not only services the campus community but it also regularly holds public shows, specialty shows, k-12 classes and private events. Their most recent show is a movie called Black Holes: The Other Side of Infinity (opens new window). We wanted to make sure they had the space and ability to promote all they offer on their website.

Dynamic Schedule

Something we did specifically for the Planetarium website was to build a mini calendar on their homepage that highlighted the dates with shows. Upon clicking those dates the show list appears below. We have a standard events calendar style that we use on every other site but it became clear when working through how visitors use the site that they want to get this schedule information quickly and clicking through multiple pages was too slow. So we made the calendar fully dynamic to allow for greater visitor interactivity and success.

View the new Planetarium website at: http://planetarium.wayne.edu/ (opens new window)