From old master to modern masterpiece: The story behind the Tate's web rebirth

How the art institution found the tech to match its online ambitions...

With four galleries and 7.5 million visitors a year, the Tate is an art institution. But when it comes to the Tate's online presence, it's more old master than modern masterpiece.

Since its launch 10 years ago, the Tate's website has largely avoided any serious overhaul.

However, with the site receiving between one million and 1.8 million visitors per month, the organisation decided it was time to revamp its online presence by building a completely new website.

The two-year process of remaking the site is now almost over, and a new site is set to go live in autumn 2011.

The new Tate website will put more emphasis on the art itself with larger images and more informationImage: Tate

"What we have now is a website that is extremely old and doesn't do all the things we want to do. Our ambitions far outstretch the technology and design. Really, we're having to tear the whole thing apart and start again," head of Tate Online John Stack told a press event in London recently.

According to Stack, the Tate's website must change from being merely a marketing tool to a way of sparking the interest of art lovers around the world and encouraging them to engage with the Tate and other art bodies.

"Broadly speaking, what [the Tate's web strategy] says is, the website will move from being something that is really a publication to something that's much more of a platform for dialogue. Where previously there would be one tone of voice, there will be individual personalities there, curators talking, lots more opinions about art, maybe conflicting with each other," he said.

Although much of the Tate's collection was digitised through a Lottery-funded project a decade ago, the existing website didn't make the most of such content, its online head believes. One of the aims with the new website - currently in beta - is to "see the relationship between the physical artwork and the manifestation of it online".

The changes brought to the revamped site include larger images - up from a maximum width of 730 pixels to 1,500 pixels - and drawing from the Tate's extensive database about the 70,000 works of art in its collection to provide...

... much richer content to complement the images - including information on the artwork's history, previous ownership, where to find it in the Tate's galleries, links to related scholarly works and other similar art.

"We want to drive you from whatever artwork you're looking at to other artwork. We want to drive you into the long tail of the collection because there are all kinds of amazing stuff people don't know about," Stack said.

The web team also needed to strike a balance with the new site that would see it appeal to as broad a range of people as possible.

The Tate's new website will need to appeal to as broad a range of people as possibleImage: Tate

"The collection of these artworks online needs to appeal to everyone. From the 13-year-old who is maybe thinking of doing GCSE art - we don't want them to be put off by massively scholarly material and thinking, 'Oh, I don't know if this is for me' - they just want to look at pictures. And at the other end of the spectrum, the Oxford don - we don't want that person to think, 'This is dumbing down'," Stack said.

The new site incorporates elements from other well-known websites, such as Getty Images, and Amazon's recommendation functionality.

Other new elements on the website include slideshows built on HTML5 making them suitable for devices such as Apple's iPad. There is also an emphasis on short-form video content with artist interviews complementing longer lecture content available on the current site.

The new website will integrate more social media elements including the Tate's existing presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

The organisation wants to use these platforms to help people engage with art, whether it's related to the Tate or not, according to Stack. The Tate's Twitter feed, for example, mentions art events around the UK as well as Tate events.

A change of hosts

In order to support the extensive revamping of the website, Tate moved its website hosting to NTT Europe's cloud infrastructure in April 2011.

With the old approach, the web team had started to use other platforms - such as Rackspace - to host elements of the website but such variety of providers managing the diverse elements was becoming too complicated to manage.

Putting the website onto a single infrastructure has allowed...

...the online tech to be better integrated and the organisation to be more agile and experiment more with the development of its technology, according to Tate's director of information services Rob Gethen Smith.

A new content management system was moved from Java to Drupal during its development, for example - normally such a move would have been a major change. However, NTT was able to handle the transition for the Tate without the organisation having to make major infrastructure changes.

The ability to add more capacity to the website has also been made easier through the new hosting arrangement. The Tate currently uses 10 servers in NTT's datacentre but can add more if needed.

Tate is hosting its website on NTT Europe's cloud infrastructure making its web development more agileImage: Tate

Mobile apps makeover

Along with the website itself, the tech team is also looking at developing its mobile apps to provide visitors with more ways to interact with the Tate's art.

There are already three mobile games and two multimedia tours available and the Tate plans to develop more applications in the near future, including augmented reality, virtual maps, mobile ticketing and member-specific applications.

The museum is also working on improving the wi-fi networks in its museums to help people access these technologies as and when they're released.

Gethen Smith said the value of a high-quality online presence for art galleries is clear: providing the public with access to more art while at the same time driving visitor numbers to actual galleries.

"There's been a shift. Once upon a time a reproduction of an artwork was seen as no substitute. Now it is at the heart of Tate's mission to reach more people and increase the public's understanding and enjoyment of British and modern international art," he said.

"Whereas a decade ago there was a fear that the web would cannibalise people actually visiting museums, gallery visits have never been stronger with over half our visitors having also visited our website. The gap between the physical and the digital is certainly closing," he added.