Our Work - Database Integration Custom Web Design - Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum

Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum Case Study

The B&O Railroad Museum is recognized universally as the birthplace of American railroading. Located in Baltimore , Maryland , it is the oldest, most comprehensive American railroad collection in the world. The B&O Railroad Museum ’s website is a resource for train enthusiasts around the world. It contains the history of the museum, resources to access information on their collections, as well as a robust online store which sells items from their gift shop. The B&O Railroad Museum approached WebConnection because they were unhappy with the image and performance of their existing web site.

In addition to a graphical redesign of the site, WebConnection created a series of Database driven sections to their website with commerce capabilities. These sections included:

• Purchasing of tickets to visit the museum
• Membership enrollment for both individuals and businesses
• Donation and Sponsorship enrollment
• Museum online store

The online store was designed to hold information on every product in the museum’s gift shop. Products are arranged in categories and subcategories, and contain the product’s name, description, price and image. “Shop by Category” as well as “Search Tools” on every page, provide clear navigation that allow a visitor to easily find, access and purchase products from the museum’s extensive inventory. The visitor is able to keep track of items that they have added to their cart by way of “Your Mini Cart”. This feature displays the name, quantity and price of each item that they have added as well as giving the visitor a subtotal for their entire purchase.

The B&O Railroad Museum online store is full of other useful features such as a User Log-In for identifying past orders and a 3 day memory that automatically stores a visitor's cart information if they left the site before checking out. Another feature incorporated into the checkout process is the ability to use gift certificates to pay for the order. A visitor can use multiple gift certificates in addition to traditional credit card payments to complete their transaction.

We equipped our client with robust back end Content Management tools. These tools empowered The B&O Railroad Museum to maintain every aspect of the web site from entering unique product information to managing custom shipping options. We also gave them the ability to create custom discount codes that could be used in conjunction with media campaigns. These codes would be advertised to the consumer via email, print and broadcast campaigns. Visitors who use the codes would receive a monetary reduction in their order with either a percentage or dollar amount based on the promotion. This gave our client the flexibility to promote and measure unique marketing campaigns.

In the end, this web site became an essential part of the way The B&O Railroad Museum was able to manage and distribute its merchandise globally.

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