Supporting two museum websites through a ticketing-platform migration
Eureka! The National Children’s Museum runs venues in Halifax and on the Wirral. Branch has looked after both websites for over two years and built the commercial features their booking platform could not offer.
The challenge
Ticketing ran through a third-party platform that proved unreliable. At a visitor attraction, a failed checkout on a Saturday morning can mean a lost visit and a queue of calls for a team already running a busy site.
At the same time the commercial team had ideas the platform simply could not support, and two separate venues that visitors thought of as one museum.
Constraints
Nothing could go offline. Both venues were selling tickets throughout, school bookings were in the diary months ahead, and members expected their existing passes to keep working exactly as before.
Our approach
We took responsibility for the websites first, stabilising what was there and getting monitoring in place so we could find and address problems before they reached the museum’s inbox.
From there we built commercial features around the booking platform, which gave the museum value while the larger supplier decision was still being made.
What we built
Pay It Forward
A scheme that lets returning members buy tickets for another family to visit free of charge, built around the booking platform, with the accounting and redemption handled cleanly at both ends.
Eureka! Unlimited
One annual pass covering both venues, with joining, renewals and member recognition working consistently across two sites that had previously behaved as separate businesses.
Technical detail
Both sites run on bespoke WordPress with custom blocks for the marketing team, integrated with the ticketing platform’s API for availability, orders and membership records.
Integration work assumed failure as the normal case: retries, queued writes and clear fallbacks allow the experience to continue in a reduced state when a third-party system is unavailable.
When the museum moved provider, the same groundwork meant the migration could be planned as a defined data move without rebuilding the websites.
- PlatformBespoke WordPress
- IntegrationsTicketing API, CRM, payments
- AccessibilityKeyboard and screen reader tested
- MonitoringUptime and checkout alerting
- SupportMonthly continuous improvement
“Branch are intelligent, conscientious, transparent and trustworthy. They instinctively think beyond the immediate scope of a challenge and are consistently one step ahead, often having already considered the impact, options and best way forward before we have even identified a potential issue.
Their unblinkered approach has delivered significant improvements for our team. They take the time to understand problems from every perspective, putting themselves in the shoes of our different teams while keeping the customer and user experience at the centre of every decision.
We trust Branch to manage relationships with other external agencies appropriately, challenging on our behalf when needed while collaborating without ego or competitiveness. They are constantly looking for ways to make our lives easier and have become valued colleagues, practically part of our team.”
Head of Communications & Customer Service, Eureka! The National Children’s Museum
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