Bringing the Museum Experience Online
- Digital Strategy
- UX
- Content Strategy
- Visual Design
- Technical Research
- Web/eCommerce Development
With the 2026 anniversary of America's founding approaching, Colonial Williamsburg — the nation’s birthplace and world's largest living history museum — was gearing up for a banner year. And that meant transforming its digital footprint to better serve the nonprofit’s mission.
More Than a Museum Website
Colonial Williamsburg has a diverse set of audiences, from day-trippers to history buffs and teachers to corporate event planners. These audiences had been served in silos by websites that delivered poorly on the Foundation’s mission: to offer a compelling civic education for all, including those who might never visit.
A Unified Experience
Digital Pulp’s solution: Merge these distinct sites into one cohesive experience that educates both on-site and online visitors, offers visitor information, and serves those who want to stay at Colonial Williamsburg Resorts, the Foundation’s for-profit arm that helps fund its core mission.
How to Meet Audiences Where They Are
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Make It Feel Simple
The intuitive, audience-focused menu belies a web of interconnections that cross-promote visits and discovery, stays and donations to generate more revenue, while imbuing the entire experience with a historical layer.
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Offer Pathways to Deep Dives
Engaging content at the top level provides pathways for each audience to go deeper.
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Combine the Practical with the Educational
With education top of mind, Digital Pulp created a robust taxonomy-based system that offers on-site visitors wayfinding and visitor info, and also shows important historical information for each site.
Everything is Connected
We knew that an engaging museum website would evoke the on-site experience. An early insight set the stage: This was, and is, a real town, and as in any town, everything is connected. We created an interactive component to literally connect the dots.
A Resort with a Difference
To enhance resort bookings and differentiate Colonial Williamsburg’s hospitality offerings, Digital Pulp integrated external reservation systems directly into the main site.
This enables robust editorial content and cross-promotions — visitors can discover and book stays, restaurants and resort activities while the site invites them to enrich their experience with activities at a nationally renowned historic destination.
Tech Integrations for an Online Museum
Our unified website offered the opportunity to make online booking effortless for visitors. Colonial Williamsburg had relied on a patchwork of legacy booking systems — from custom ticketing and events management platforms to separate systems for hotel, spa, golf and dining reservations. We made the complexity invisible by building the unified platform on the flexible, open-source Wagtail CMS and React framework. The API integrations and smooth handoffs Digital Pulp engineered let users plan their entire visit — from reserving a hayride to booking a room — in one place and without ever feeling that they’ve left the site. The digital experience is as immersive as the physical one.
This project pushed our team into new territory. We created a metacard that separated structured factual data from textual presentation content, and then blended them together in a highly manageable form— a cutting-edge, event-based approach for content syndication, hybrid website/app architecture, and other solutions.
A Platform Designed for Growth
The comprehensive digital transformation elevated visitor engagement and improved revenue opportunities. Most recently since the launch, we rolled out an interactive “Trip Planner” feature, allowing visitors to easily schedule and personalize their Williamsburg experiences.
Digital Pulp’s work also established a robust platform that allows the Foundation to highlight its ongoing work in research and preservation, reinforcing Colonial Williamsburg’s mission to bring the true history of Colonial America vividly into the present.