Creating a Modern Digital Experience to Bring Local History to Life

The York County History Center preserves and shares the region’s rich history through museum sites, archival collections, events, and educational programs. When it came time to update their website, the organization was seeking more than a design refresh—they needed a platform that could evolve with their mission, better serve a diverse audience, and simplify site management. Following a competitive RFP process, the GRIT team was selected to lead the comprehensive website redesign and development effort with a focus on usability, accessibility, and content structure.

The project came at a pivotal moment as the History Center prepared to launch its new core museum experience. There was a need to reimagine the online presence to match the scale and significance of the new physical space, positioning the site as a central hub for exploration, delivering clarity in how programs and events are presented, and ensuring that all audiences, from researchers to casual visitors, could find what they need with ease.

Building a Site Around Real Needs and Real Users

A hallmark of GRIT’s website design process, project work began with a collaborative discovery phase that included in-depth conversations with each department across the History Center. These discussions informed both the site’s functionality and its content priorities, ensuring that the new site would support the specific needs of all users, including researchers, donors, students, tourists, and the internal team.

A key challenge was streamlining the content structure, particularly the distinction between events and programs. Our team developed a content strategy that brought clarity to these areas while allowing for flexible, visual storytelling. GRIT provided comprehensive content mapping to assist with the History Center team’s content creation. This involved evaluating the existing site content and providing guidance on what should carry over to the new platform and where it should live. GRIT also delivered recommendations for which page templates to use and options to present each content section using one of the many flexible layout options available on the site.

A Design That Balances Boldness and Accessibility

The final website design reflects a clean, modern aesthetic that emphasizes large typography, rich imagery, and intuitive layouts. While preserving the core elements of the History Center’s brand, GRIT developed an ADA-compliant web color palette that met accessibility contrast standards without sacrificing visual identity. To ensure ease of use on the back end, the site was developed in WordPress with a fully custom set of flexible content blocks. These blocks allow the History Center team to build engaging pages with a high degree of visual variety—no developer support needed.

Enhanced Functionality and Integrated Tools

The new site offers an improved experience for users and internal teams alike, with advanced features and integrations that streamline both front-end engagement and back-end administration. Key capabilities include:

A fully integrated calendar and event management system
Site-wide alert bar with built-in expiration settings
Robust search experience that spans internal site content and external resources
Customized CMS user roles and access levels
Database integration, including with PastPerfect collections software to support intuitive public access to archival material, and with Versai for seamless donation processing, ticketing, and e-commerce functions, all within a unified user experience.