Botanic Gardens & State Herbarium

Digital

SA's Botanic Gardens

South Australia’s Botanic Gardens & State Herbarium in Adelaide, Mt Lofty and Blackwood are iconic places of outdoor joy, ecological diversity, education and scientific research.

Words from the client

With so much beauty in our botanic gardens and such great science stories to tell, we knew we needed a website that was reflective of this vibrancy and excitement. Distilling a vast amount of information into a manageable and attractive website was a challenge that the Studio Veld team took on with gusto. With a short amount of time to deliver, the team worked collaboratively and efficiently to develop a design we loved from the moment we saw it. Their creative expertise and hard work shone through, and we greatly appreciated their willingness to problem-solve, patience and kindness. We now have a contemporary site that is fitting for our world-class institution.

—Lizzy Ray, Marketing Manager

Botanic Gardens Portfolio centre feature desktop

Brief

Working inside existing branding guidelines, the Botanic Gardens wanted to refresh their Craft CMS website and untangle large amounts of content making it easier for their visitors to find. The website is used for education, tourism and event management, and to house and engage with scientific research. It needed to be visually appealing to all audiences as well as improve its accessibility. An organic collection of integrations also needed consolidation, including information collection, ticketing and donation payments system.

Approach

This was a clear case of needing to understand the different groups of people who use the site and how immediate each of their needs might be. If you’ve packed the kids in the car and you want to know where to park, you need that at your fingertips. If you’re looking at what’s on, you want to browse. And if you want to know what to plant in your backyard, you might be prepared to dig deeper.

It quickly became clear that reimagining the user journeys would require a restructure rather than a web refresh. We reframed our thinking, created a new design that would fit within their budget and timeframe and went back to the client with a proposal to rebuild. The silver lining: a green light from the client and the Department of Environment and Water IT team gave us the opportunity to futureproof this website by taking it from Craft CMS 2 to Craft CMS 4.

Botanic Gardens Portfolio website screenshot

Interactive tool that allows the user to take a quick glance at the highlights of every garden.

Goal: to support the user's decision on which garden to visit, and bring awareness about the gardens’ biodiversity.

Section that allows the user to scroll through what's on in every garden with a summary of each event’s relevant information.

Goal: to make the ’plan a visit process’ smooth and straight forward whilst showing the user the overall picture of how they can enjoy the gardens’ events.

Accessibility tool that allows the users to set up several website parameters according to their specific needs.

Goal: to support a broad range of user groups have the most friendly and accessible experience in the website.