Japanese American National Museum

The Japanese American National Museum (JANM) is dedicated to preserving the cultural heritage of people of Japanese ancestry in the United States. Located in the Little Tokyo neighborhood in Los Angeles, the museum doubles as a civil rights center, straddling the traditional museum categories. 

Over 100,000 people visit the museum annually, but its reach goes far beyond the physical space. A Smithsonian affiliate, JANM offers programs in arts and history across three main websites and several microsites, some of them translated into multiple languages. 

Like most museums, JANM’s flagship website strives to sell tickets and increase event attendance. Converting website visitors into museum attendees relies heavily on the “surprise and delight” factor. JANM’s web team achieves this via a modern and tasteful implementation of Drupal, built by the web development agency Urban Insight and powered by Pantheon. 

“One thing that always amazes me is that when I don’t visit their site for a couple of weeks or a month, and then come back: the home page will feel like a completely new site. And that is a testament to how effective JANM’s content editors are with using all of the different components that we built for them,” shared said Mark Dischler, CTO at Urban Insight. 

Challenges with DIY Hosting and Outdated Design

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JANM faced significant challenges with its outdated website and legacy hosting when they brought on Urban Insight. Hosted on Linode, the site was a patchwork of static pages and a Django backend, making it unreliable and difficult to manage. Content management was extremely cumbersome, requiring desktop access, an FTP client and an HTML editor. This outdated system hindered the digital team's ability to keep content current and relevant.

The legacy design was a holdover from the Web 1.0 era when pages were designed for a 640-pixel screen. “They had waited so long to update the site that the 640 screens became appropriate for the mobile only. So on a mobile phone, the text was tiny, but it would fit nicely into the viewport,” recalled Dischler. 

Urban Insight set out to tackle these challenges and modernize JANM's digital presence. The primary goals included enhancing site reliability, improving user experience and increasing engagement. The agency re-platformed the site to Drupal, addressing JANM's need for a robust content management system and streamlined operations.

Then also transitioned JANM from Linode to Pantheon, leveraging its Multidev feature to manage updates separately from the main site. This allowed for smooth upgrades to Drupal 8, 9 and 10 without disrupting the user experience. The redesigned site enabled JANM's digital team to make updates on the go, significantly improving workflow efficiency.

Our legacy deployment process resembled an old-time telephone operator process where we’d have to plug in multiple things to make it work. Once we transitioned to Drupal, I could log in and make text edits at the stadium, while watching the Dodgers’ game. That’s what you need in case of an emergency. It was a huge win and a huge credit to Drupal for having that flexible and responsive admin experience to make those quick changes on the go.” 

- Vicky Murakami-Tsuda, Digital Program Manager at JANM 

Empowering Innovation: JANM's Skilled Digital Team Drives Growth

JANM's digital team is uniquely skilled, combining technical expertise with content-oriented strategies. This allows Urban Insight to build flexible tools within Drupal to empower the team to create and manage content dynamically. For example, the flexible landing page content type, built with Drupal’s Paragraphs, allows JANM’s team to rearrange and repurpose components creatively across the site.

​Over the past 12 months, traffic from outside Los Angeles increased by an average of 19% across major cities like New York, Seattle, San Francisco and Chicago. This growth reflects the team's ability to innovate while relying on Pantheon and Urban Insight for security, uptime and website performance.

Multilingual Capabilities to Enhance Accessibility

JANM's commitment to multilingual audiences, as well as accessibility and inclusion, is evident in its multilingual websites. Utilizing Drupal's native multilingual features, the core content is available in both English and Japanese. Unique to JANM's implementation is the ability to display English content when Japanese translations are not yet available, creating a hybrid bilingual user experience. This approach allows JANM to roll out translations at their own pace while ensuring continuous content availability. 

The agency has also built in flexibility that allows text translation at both the component and content type levels. Additionally, users can have alternate images based on the language. For example, if an image contains branded text or a call to action, it can be replaced with a version in Japanese.

“The Discover Nikkei website is actually a really great example of how wide JANM reaches. It was built in four languages to connect people of Japanese descent who have migrated and settled throughout the world. So that spirit of accessibility and inclusion weaves through all of our web properties and underscores the JANM mission,” said Murakami-Tsuda. 

Developer Innovations for the Museum Audience

Urban Insight developed several special features to meet JANM's diverse needs. These include:

• Democracy Center Sub-Site: A unique sub-site with its own branding and logos, integrated seamlessly within the main Drupal site.
• Microsites for Special Events: Flexible microsites for promoting gala events and other special initiatives, enabling JANM to maintain consistent design while tailoring user experiences for specific campaigns.
• Enhanced Gallery Component: Expanding the reach of the museum experience through online exhibitions that feature immersive, interactive gallery views, with panoramic photos, paintings and archival materials.

Putting JANM on Pantheon was a no-brainer. To develop all these advanced features, we needed modern developer tools. Thanks to the JANM team's technical proficiency and Pantheon’s platform reliability, we can keep innovating rather than just refining existing features. For our dev team, developing on Pantheon is a dream. The museum is also pleased because they are empowered to advance JANM's mission, continuously innovating for in-person and virtual museum visitors - the ultimate happy customers.”

- Mark Dischler, CTO at Urban Insight