Football Museum of Wales and Wrexham Museum

A high bar, and a fixed deadline

The museum needed a fully bi-lingual, accessible website – every page, feature and word of content had to be available in both Welsh and English, presented with genuine parity rather than as an afterthought, and fully accessible. The site needs to reach and serve a broad set of audiences – local residents, families, schools, researchers, and football fans from Wrexham AFC supporters to international followers of the Welcome to Wrexham story – and it had to be built, populated and launched against a fixed, immovable deadline. Funded by Welsh Government and the National Lottery Heritage Fund, this was a project where getting the fundamentals right was as crucial as the finish.

Bringing a bold new museum brand to life online

Central to the project was bringing the Museum’s brand-new identity to life online – bold, fresh and vibrant. Translating a brand  into an engaging digital design is something we relish, and this one gave us plenty to work with: an incredibly bright, high-energy colour palette and the distinctive, ownable B52 typeface for headlines, paired with Outfit as a clean, highly legible secondary face. We used the brand’s colour combinations to bring excitement and dynamism to the visual language – in the intended pairings, keeping contrast strong and the identity consistent – letting B52 carry personality across titles while Outfit keeps longer, bilingual content easy to read in both languages. The homepage opens with a full-width video flythrough in the hero area: an immediate, immersive first impression that pulls visitors straight into the experience and captures the ambition at the heart of the offer, to bring two musuems together, interwoven, under one roof.

A flexible, modular WordPress build

We built the site bespoke on WordPress, using a modular, Atomic Design approach so that a core set of flexible templates could carry the majority of the site. Prioritising the Master Content Template early meant the Museum’s team could begin populating content while other development continued in parallel – the key to delivering a full, engaging website within a tight timeframe. Just as importantly, the CMS was built to be genuinely usable – so the team can manage and expand both language versions with confidence, supported by hands-on training and a recorded session for future reference.

Fully bilingual: Welsh and English

Full bilingual capability sits at the heart of the site. We integrated WPML to give staff a straightforward way to manage Welsh and English versions of every page, with a persistent, intuitive language toggle throughout – and visitor information such as accessibility, opening times and travel presented permanently in both languages, never hidden behind a switch. The new brand is used to differentiate the historic and football strands while holding them within a single, cohesive identity, so visitors can orient themselves quickly whichever story, and whichever language, they arrive for.

Accesible by design: WCAG 2.2AA

Accessibility was designed and developed in from the start rather than retro-fitted, with the site built to meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA – semantic HTML, clear heading structures, alt text, keyboard navigation, strong colour contrast and screen-reader compatibility throughout. Careful sitemap and redirect planning protected the Museum’s existing search rankings through the move, and GA4 was implemented to give the team ongoing insight from day one. The architecture is deliberately future-ready, so new areas and functionality – including online retail, and a full ticketing solution – can be brought online as the Museum grows.

Search and audience-led discovery

To promote audience discovery, we implemented Algolia for fast, typo-tolerant, search-as-you-type discovery across the site and for powerful filtering capability within specific areas such as events. Gravity Forms drive user-friendly enquiry pathways for schools, venue hire and general contact.  

What’s next? 

We’re really excited for the opening of what is a landmark Museum for Wrexham and looking forward to working with the team there to grow the site’s capabilities and its reach in a second phase. It’s the latest in a number of WordPress websites we’ve delivered for museums, heritage organisations and visitor attractions — accessible, bilingual where needed, and built to grow.