About the Company
UBC Botanical Garden is Canada’s oldest university botanical garden, spanning 20 hectares and home to more than 5,300 different kinds of plants. The garden acts as a living classroom, connecting people to plants through interdisciplinary research, education, and community partnerships, while their programs foster environmental literacy.
Objectives
- Improve the overall aesthetic and user experience and make the site more engaging
- Overhaul site architecture and navigation to enable easier browsing and content discovery
- Drive conversion of site visitors into ticket purchases and memberships
- Build on SEO foundations to increase search engine traffic and drive future growth
- Use a block-based, low-code WordPress implementation to give the team full control over content updates and future scalability.
Results
70 %
Engagement Rate
104 %
Pageviews
Prototyping
UBC Botanical Garden garden operates as a department of UBC’s Faculty of Science, and is funded by grants, partnerships, donations, and admissions. The website receives tens of thousands of visitors each month. It needs to quickly guide the majority of those visitors to purchase tickets, while helping others find ways to support or book the facilities.
We focused the first stages of this project on restructuring the menus for clearer audience segmentation, merging and reorganizing the vastly spread-out resources, improving page layouts, and recommending post types to support automating content relationships.
Style
UBC Botanical Garden had good existing branding, but their old site was mostly white backgrounds and too much text. We had the opportunity to expand their palette with hints of purple and brighter green, and add more dark green and mint colour blocks. Subtle hover effects, updated icons, and subtle background plant illustrations give the site a much more modern look while maintaining an outdoorsy vibe.
Bringing it All Together
The new UBC Botanical Garden site is bright and attractive. Users can quickly find information about the garden, tours, Nitobe Memorial Garden, programs, tours, and how to book the garden for special events. Testimonials and statistics generate excitement about booking a visit. And now that their site is built on our flexible site builder platform, Refoundry, their team can manage not only content but also page layouts, global styles, and local elements – without a developer.
Results
104 %
Pageviews
70 %
Engagement Rate
See the Finished Site
Go explore the full website, then come back to discover more of our work!
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