What’s new on the Europeana website? June - September 2022

An inviting new homepage available in 25 European languages

On 31 August 2022 we released a brand new homepage. The aim for this new design is to more effectively communicate to people what they can gain by visiting the website and encourage them to engage with the various features.  

To find out how the new homepage can best cater to peoples’ needs, we investigated what they normally do on the website and found that, mostly, people want to find a specific item. They usually do this by using the search. To better support this, in the new homepage design we introduced an additional search bar and gave it a prominent place.

The second most common thing that people do on our website is browse content to get inspired. To encourage browsing from the new homepage, we are now promoting our thematic collections in what we think of as our 'themes swiper' - just swipe left and right to discover more themes. Below that you will find the latest blog posts, exhibitions and galleries.

To increase participation we designed and implemented banners that invite people to take certain actions, like create a Europeana account or sign up for the newsletter.

Visually, we gave the homepage a new look. The new ‘brutalist’ design sets the tone for a style that we will continue developing site-wide. The artistic movement of brutalism is known for its stark, honest and captivating style, communicating innovation and trust. The components literally grow out-of-the-box, looking great on any screen including the largest, so people will have a pleasant experience whether they are browsing on their mobile during their commute or presenting on a large TV screen at a conference. 

To communicate our messages clearly and make the website welcoming, we translated all the editorial on the homepage into 25 European languages and continue to ensure it is fully accessible.

To validate the new homepage designs we conducted user testing. We started by making sure that people could perform all the key tasks. We continued with tests for the visual style and the editorial used on the page, to be sure that what and how we communicate is well understood. If you want to know more about the homepage design and get insight into the process and results of user testing, take a look at this presentation.

Helping you find out more about our partner organisations

Our Organisations page offers an almost complete list of organisations that share their digitised collections with us. Where we were displaying the English translation of the organisation name, we have now added the organisation’s native name on top of it. This means that more people can now read the organisation name and understand what type of content they can expect that organisation to provide. We believe that with this approach we can help our partner organisations become better known to audiences across Europe and beyond. 

Besides the update in naming, on the Organisations page, you can now see an item count for each organisation, so you have an idea of how big each collection is. 

Informative error pages

While browsing, it’s possible you may bump into an error on our website. Previously, the resulting error messages weren’t very informative. To provide more support, we are redesigning them to more clearly explain what went wrong. We already released new, more informative error messages for some scenarios, and there are more to come. Hopefully these will help people navigate the website and find what they are looking for. 

This quarter in numbers

From 1 June to 20 September 2022, the Europeana website recorded 1.26 million visits and 46,586 item downloads. 

The three most-liked items were Ukmergės RKB gimimo metrikų knyga, provided by the Lietuvos valstybės istorijos archyvas (Lithuanian state historical archives), Summer night. Inger on the beach, provided by KODE - the Art Museums of Bergen, Norway and Bataviasche koloniale courant - 1810-06-08, provided by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands).