Brighton & Hove Museums
Ongoing WordPress development and support for Brighton & Hove Museums, the charitable trust behind five of the city's best-loved venues, including a move from embedded Spektrix widgets to a fully integrated, API-driven booking and donation journey.
Visit website2025
Ongoing since 2025
WordPress
The challenge & the solution.
Brighton & Hove Museums cares for five venues across the city: the Royal Pavilion & Garden, Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, Hove Museum of Creativity, Preston Manor and the Booth Museum of Natural History. The website was built by an agency several years ago, and it carries a lot of load: ticketing, events, membership, donations, venue hire and the trust's collections all run through it. Ticket booking and donations relied on Spektrix's standard embedded widgets, which looked and behaved differently from the rest of the site and limited what the team could do with them. Over time, the team also needed more flexibility in how pages were built, and a dependable partner to fix issues as they came up.
Since taking over the site in 2025, I've worked with the team to make it more flexible, more reliable and better connected. Working closely with Spektrix, I replaced the out-of-the-box embeds with a custom integration built on the Spektrix API, so ticket booking, basket, account, membership and donations now feel like part of the site rather than a bolt-on. I've added new modules and more customisation options so the team can build richer pages themselves, and improved key areas including membership, Support us, Groups & Tours and Venue Hire. I've also optimised the site for AI search and LLMs, so the venues and what's on are easier for assistants and search engines to understand. Alongside that, I handle day-to-day fixes and improvements, so the team has one point of contact for the whole site.
What we delivered for Brighton & Hove Museums.
- Ticket booking and donations moved from embedded widgets to a custom Spektrix API integration
- A booking, basket and account journey that matches the rest of the site
- New modules and customisation options the in-house team can use without a developer
- Improved membership, donation, Groups & Tours and Venue Hire pages
- Content optimised for AI search and LLMs
- Ongoing support and fixes from a single point of contact
We've been working with Lewis for the best part of a year now and his work on our site has been fantastic. He is always responsive, work is done swiftly and with the outcome we were expecting. We've recently embarked on some larger projects looking at AI optimisation for the site, which is going very well, and an upcoming multi-venue rebrand which we're looking forward to collaborating on with Lewis.
The home page, with a full-width carousel promoting exhibitions and events across all five venues.
The venues grid, giving each of the five museums its own card, colour and Book Now button linked to live ticketing.
A venue landing page for the Royal Pavilion & Garden, with a hero, Book Tickets call to action and its own section navigation.
Membership options with Individual, Joint and Gift tabs, each tier joining straight through the Spektrix API.
The Patrons Circle, presenting three tiers of support with clear benefits and a Become Patron button for each.
The custom donation module, with preset amounts or a custom figure, built on the Spektrix API instead of an embedded widget.