The Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam sits on the Plantage Middenlaan: a green place in the middle of the city, spread across nine garden sections and glasshouses, from the Butterfly House to the carnivorous plant bed. The website is not a leaflet alongside it. It sells the tickets, keeps the calendar up to date, shows visitors the way around the grounds and even runs on the screen at the entrance.
We have built and maintained that site since 2017. In 2024 the Hortus commissioned research into how its own website was being used; that became the reason for a completely new one. It has been online since 2025, on the same custom theme we use for other cultural institutions. The maintenance simply carries on.
The challenge
A botanical garden does not sell a product but a visit. Everything on the site leads towards that: what is in flower now, what is on this weekend, how you get there and what it costs. At the same time the content changes with the season. The calendar fills up again, a glasshouse closes for maintenance, an exhibition comes to an end.
The editorial team has to be able to keep that up to date themselves, without someone from us being needed for every change. And the garden itself does not fit into a menu: nine garden sections and glasshouses, spread across grounds that visitors only understand once they see them in front of them.
A botanical garden does not sell a product but a visit
Our approach
We started with the route a visitor takes: first get your bearings, then plan, then buy.
- A custom theme with fixed content blocks, so the editorial team builds pages out of parts that always sit right - on a phone too
- A clickable map on which every garden section and every glasshouse is a coloured area that links through to its own page
- An integration with the ticket shop, so that from every page a visitor goes through the same three steps: choose a ticket, choose a day, pay
- Donation forms with iDEAL for specific appeals, such as the renewal of the glass roof of the Palm House
- An accessibility widget and an English version that follows the same structure as the Dutch one
Hosting, monitoring and ongoing maintenance run with us - including the screen at the entrance, which shows a page from the same site to whoever has just come in.
The result
The new site has been online since 2025 and drew around 14,500 visitors from Google in July 2026. The editorial team updates the calendar itself, the map does what a map should do, and a donation appeal is a matter of a form and a page instead of a project.
Development has carried on since the launch: a donation page for the glass roof of the Palm House, a second ticket shop for the Vereniging Hortus, and an entrance screen that shows the same site to whoever has just walked through the gate.
You have already walked the garden before you are inside
Nine years with the same partner, and since 2025 a site in which getting your bearings, planning and buying have become one movement.
“A botanical garden does not sell a product but a visit. That calls for a site where you see straight away what is in flower now, what there is to do and how you buy a ticket - and where our own editorial team keeps the calendar up to date without any technology being needed for it.”
Barbara van Amelsfoort
Head of Marketing, programming & education - Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam
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