H’ART Museum stands on the Amstel, in the building that housed the Hermitage until 2023. With the new name came a new programme: changing collaborations with museums such as the Centre Pompidou and the British Museum, instead of one fixed partner. What hangs on the walls changes, and who comes to see it changes with it.
That makes a museum site something other than a shop window for a permanent collection. Every exhibition brings its own audience, its own visual language and its own story, and all of them have to fit in the same house without the house being rebuilt for each one. At the same time a large part of the visitors come for something much simpler: what is on show now, is it open, and can I buy a ticket. Those two things - a programme that keeps changing shape and a handful of questions that are always the same - have to exist side by side, on one page, often on a phone and often in two languages.
We built the new website in 2024. Since then we have managed it and kept developing it. That way the site keeps moving with a programme that is reinvented for every exhibition.
The challenge
A museum site has one hard task: to take the visitor from “what is on show” to a ticket without losing them along the way. That is harder than it sounds, because everything moves. Exhibitions come to an end, activities are one-off, and the price differs per exhibition.
On top of that came the change of name. Everything published under Hermitage - pages, documents, regulations, and every link that pointed to the old site from outside - had to come along to H’ART without anything running dead.
From “what is on show” to a ticket, without getting lost along the way
Our approach
We built the site out of the things the museum makes itself, and connected ticket sales to them directly.
- Content types of its own for exhibitions, calendar activities, press releases and vacancies, plus an FAQ - each with its own fields, so that the editors fill in rather than lay out
- Ticket sales inside the page: every exhibition and every activity has its own widget from the Enviso ticketing system, with the price next to it and a button that opens the ticket module in a pop-up. The language of that module follows the language of the page
- Multilingual with WPML: /nl and /en side by side, right into the ticket module
- An extensive search function with filters across exhibitions and activities
- All the old Hermitage URLs redirected, and the regulations, disclaimers, documents and images from the old site brought across and rewritten to the new name
- An accessibility menu on every page: greyscale, high contrast and a more legible typeface
- Forms with Gravity Forms, with the newsletter sign-up passed straight through to the museum’s CRM
- A phased go-live: part one went live on 13 May 2024, the rest stayed closed off until it was finished - with a “not yet available” page instead of a 404
The result
The site went live on 13 May 2024, with the new name on it and the old addresses underneath. Since then a different programme has passed over it every season - from Chez Matisse with the Centre Pompidou to American Identities - without the site having to be set up again for it.
And we are still building on it. In 2026 a direct integration with the museum’s CRM replaced the old plug-in, the same integration we also use for De Nieuwe Kerk, and the ticket module gained a pop-up for additional sales.
Every exhibition its own price, every page its own ticket
A new name on the facade, and online not a single door that still leads to the old one.
“The move from Hermitage to H'art had to go flawlessly online; we had no second chance at that. Eenvoud guided it calmly and well prepared, right down to the temporary site that took visitors along in the name change.”
Issa Shum
Sales & marketing manager - H`ART Museum
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