Rock Hall

Stories told from our perspective of authority.

One line. Every decision flowed from it.

The Backstory

This was 2009. The Barbarian Group was at its peak—Cannes Lions, Webbys, the whole thing. Rock Hall's analytics showed they reached 20x the audience online as coming through the door. It was time to change the relationship the museum had with the digital world.

The Problem

Rock Hall had stakeholders the way a carcass has vultures—Cleveland executives, a New York board, downtown business owners, legacy consultants who wanted the work we'd won. Everyone had an opinion about what RockHall.com should be:

  • "It should be tickets and tour dates."
  • "It should be the Wikipedia of rock and roll."
  • "It should be Web 2.0—ratings and comments."

All valid. All wrong.

Every museum site has tickets and tour dates. Wikipedia already exists. And Rock Hall's entire value is that they decide who's in and who's out—letting users vote would undermine the authority that made the institution matter.

We had to decide what the project actually was.

Interview findings slide showing content opportunities identified during stakeholder research
Interview findings: stakeholders agreed there wasn't enough content—and what existed wasn't being leveraged.

The Strategic Position

Through three months of research, interviews, and analysis, I wrote the line that defined everything:

"Create a dialogue around stories told from our perspective of authority."

That single line became the filter. Every subsequent decision—content model, information architecture, CMS design, publishing workflow—flowed from it. (Certainty is short.)

The System

The old site had 5,000 pages of completely unstructured content. I designed the system that would replace it.

Content Model

We modeled multiple content types for different purposes: Inductee Pages, Exhibits, Video archives, Evergreen Stories, Blog Posts. With input from the historians at Rock Hall, we created small atoms of content that could be used in more than one context.

Every page had metadata: Featured Artist(s) and Genre. We could grab atoms from larger pools—"show me other content from the genre of Blues."

Annotated homepage wireframe showing content zones and editorial strategy
Homepage wireframe with annotations. Note the "web of context" concept (4)—every content atom linked to related items, enabling the system to surface connections automatically.

Information Architecture

Broad questions answered at the top of the hierarchy. Specific questions answered at the leaves. When Michael Jackson died during our discovery phase, Rock Hall could surface everything they knew—automatically, because the content model supported it.

Site map showing the information architecture divided into The Museum and The Mission sections
The site map separated "The Museum" (operational) from "The Mission" (editorial authority). Yellow boxes indicate main navigation; dotted boxes show content initiatives.

Publishing Infrastructure

Custom CMS in Python/Django, specifically chosen for its ability to relate content to content. I was the primary author, building pages while we built the system—and then trained 30 people to use it.

Django CMS admin interface showing page editing fields and content structure
The custom Django CMS. Simple editing interface, but the power was in the relationships—every page could link to sections, templates, and related content.

Response Capability

The system could react to the world. Breaking news banner. Contextual content surfacing. When relevance spiked, Rock Hall could meet the moment—not because someone scrambled to create content, but because the system already knew what existed and how to surface it.

The Results

Peak traffic during events exceeded previous years. Page views per session more than doubled. Bounce rate dropped from 62% to 34%. Time on site doubled.

Traffic to the Inductees section: up 1,500%.

Traffic to the store: up 13,000%. Not a typo. Thirteen thousand percent. Strategic placement turned a gift shop into a destination, which is either information architecture or a magic trick; the difference is mostly vocabulary.

Launched Rock Hall homepage featuring Jimi Hendrix with breaking news banner and contextual content
The launched homepage. Breaking news banner at top, hero carousel featuring inductees, contextual content surfacing on the right. The system in action.

Then Google released the "MayDay" update, rewarding fresh content. The system was already built for it. Rock Hall could publish fast, publish contextually, and publish at scale. The infrastructure paid dividends we hadn't anticipated.

Press coverage headline: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum's revamped website entices visitors with exclusive content
Press coverage after launch. The site wasn't just redesigned—it became a content destination.

Why This Project Changed Me

This is where I stopped being a UX designer.

I didn't know it at the time. I still called myself that for another decade, the way you keep wearing a band's t-shirt long after you've stopped listening to the album. But looking back, Rock Hall was the turn.

The deliverables were familiar—sitemaps, wireframes, CMS templates. The work wasn't about the deliverables. It was about identifying a strategic position. Designing a content system that could express that position at scale. Building infrastructure that let the organization respond to the world in real-time.

I didn't design screens. I designed the system that made screens mean something.

Every project since has been a variation on that discovery. What's the underlying position? What's the system that supports it? What infrastructure makes it executable?

Rock Hall was the first time I understood: the experience isn't the interface. The experience is the system underneath. The rot was already there. I just followed where it wanted to go.