Empire State Building

The Client

The Empire State Building needs no introduction. It’s the most famous building in the world, and the worldwide symbol for New York City – the city that defines cities.

The Situation

If the Empire State Building was to truly stand out among New York City’s other world-class observatories, its website needed to modernize and streamline the user experience. Ticketing functionality wasn’t intuitive, the sitemap was confusing and the design language didn’t back up the building’s status as a must-see destination. The Empire State Building team had big plans: Deploy a new website with an optimized user experience in tandem with exciting updates to the building itself, and remind the world why the Empire State Building remains such a timeless icon.

The Challenge

With visitors arriving from every corner of the world, the Empire State Building website needed to make purchasing tickets and planning a visit easy enough for the global stage. But visiting the Empire State Building is a lot more than just getting a ticket to the top: add-ons and unique experiences abound. The purchase journey had to provide all the information a user needs to feel secure upgrading a ticket, while still remaining lean enough to please the customers that just want to get tickets and get on with their lives.

Beyond the ticketing experience, there was also a large amount of content available across the existing Empire State Building website that would need to be curated, reorganized and repositioned if it were to add value to the overall website experience.

The Solution

Blue Fountain Media performed a holistic audit of the Empire State Building’s existing website, which made clear the need for a flexible development platform that could both support a complex marketplace integration and also deliver a multilingual, content-driven experience. Together, the teams selected Drupal and Acquia Cloud Platform to bring to life the broad new design vision without sacrificing the productive experience that business demanded.

The new Empire State Building website integrates with Gateway Ticketing Systems to deliver a purchase flow that showcases the variety of experiences available at the Empire State Building. Thanks to restructured data and a revamped website architecture, guiding users through this purchase journey is intuitive across all personas. Plus, for those curious enough to explore, they’ll discover a range of Empire State Building facts, information and history across the site, making it perhaps the most informative resource about the building available.

The Results

While the new website only recently launched, it’s already showing positive signs of new growth.

The Empire State Building website now offers an experience to match its world-famous namesake. Visitors from all over the world can easily plan their trips, purchase tickets or learn more about this modern marvel in one place.