Monterey Bay Aquarium
A new website as bold and alive as the ocean it champions
Monterey, California, USA
A modern, accessible website built to inspire a new generation of ocean advocates
An expression of a refreshed digital brand that captures the wonder of marine life
A flexible platform that empowers the Aquarium's marketing team to work independently and efficiently providing the basis for future growth and innovation
Founded in 1984 on the site of a former sardine cannery on Cannery Row, the Monterey Bay Aquarium has grown to become one of the world's most celebrated marine institutions. Home to more than 35,000 animals representing over 550 species, from playful sea otters to the awe-inspiring Kelp Forest, the Aquarium draws nearly two million visitors each year. Its mission extends far beyond its walls to inspire ocean conservation.
Cogapp was commissioned to design and build a new website on Craft CMS, replacing a legacy platform that had become difficult to maintain and slow to respond to the Aquarium's evolving content needs. The result is a site built for the long term that brings the wonder of the ocean to audiences around the world, whether they are planning a visit, exploring conservation research, or encountering the Aquarium for the very first time.
As you go deeper down the page more content is revealed from the right.
Building a better online world for ocean advocates
The Monterey Bay Aquarium serves an exceptionally broad audience: friends and families planning a day out, students and researchers, policy makers, philanthropists, and a global community of ocean enthusiasts who may never set foot in Monterey. The new website needed to speak meaningfully to all of them.
At the outset of the project, Cogapp worked closely with the Aquarium's team to articulate a clear project vision that would guide us throughout design, development and beyond:
“For everyone who wants to feel a connection to the ocean, the Monterey Bay Aquarium website is an educational, accessible and hopeful digital space that helps you plan your visit, deepens your relationship with the ocean, and inspires conservation of the ocean.”
This vision underpinned the entire project. It was our anchor for structural decisions, design choices, and content and IA strategy.
Brand colors translated into an extended digital token system.
Design: bringing the brand to life online
The new website brings the Aquarium's refreshed visual identity to life online. Working in close collaboration with the Aquarium's in-house creative team, Cogapp translated the brand into a rich, flexible design system built for the web.
The design draws directly from the Aquarium's natural environment. Deep ocean blues and the shifting greens of kelp-filtered light provide the basis of the tonal palette. Typography is confident and clear, capable of carrying the gravitas of conservation messaging and the warmth of a day out with equal ease. Generous use of full-bleed photography puts the Aquarium's extraordinary animals and exhibits front and centre at every turn; subtle home page animation ensures the website feels alive from the outset.
Accessibility was front of mind from the very outset of the project.
Accessibility was a foundational requirement, not an afterthought. Every component was designed and tested to meet WCAG 2.2 AA standards, ensuring the site is genuinely usable by all visitors regardless of ability or device. We developed a comprehensive set of components, each element accessibility tested in isolation before being assembled into pages, providing both rigour during build and a reusable toolkit for future development.
The result is a design system that is cohesive without being rigid, giving the Aquarium's editorial team the creative latitude to produce compelling content while maintaining visual consistency across every page.
Technical approach: a Craft CMS platform built for the future
The Aquarium's previous CMS had become a limiting factor. Updates were slow, it had generally become a little unwieldy, and the marketing team increasingly needed developer support to carry out tasks they should have been able to handle themselves. The new platform needed to solve these problems decisively, while also providing the architectural flexibility to support the Aquarium's digital ambitions for years to come.
Craft CMS was the clear choice. Flexible, developer-friendly, and built around an exceptional authoring experience, it gave us the technical foundation to build exactly what the Aquarium needed without compromise.
The core components of the system are:
Craft CMS
Craft as the content management backbone, running in a standard coupled configuration that provides editors with a powerful, intuitive authoring environment. Live preview, flexible content modelling, and Craft's Matrix field system allow the Aquarium's team to build rich, varied pages without touching a line of code.
A structured field architecture
An architecture that reflects the Aquarium's content complexity, from exhibit pages and animal profiles to conservation research, policy positions, and event listings. Careful content modelling ensures that related content surfaces naturally across the site, helping visitors move fluidly between a species they have just encountered and the conservation programme working to protect it.
Performance built in from the start
The front end is built for speed, with optimised asset delivery, lazy-loaded media, and careful attention to Core Web Vitals throughout. For an institution whose audiences arrive via every conceivable device and connection speed, performance is crucial.
Third-party integrations
These integrations connect the CMS to the Aquarium's existing operational systems, including ticketing and event management, ensuring that practical visitor information, e.g. opening times, ticket availability, upcoming events, is always accurate and up to date without requiring manual duplication of effort by the Aquarium team.
The site is responsive throughout and available in both English and Spanish.
Empowering the marketing team
One of the most significant outcomes of this project is one visitors will never directly see: the transformation of the day-to-day experience for the Aquarium's editors and content managers.
Craft CMS's authoring interface is one of the best out there. Combined with the structured content model Cogapp built for the Aquarium, it means that creating a new exhibit page, updating an animal profile, or publishing a conservation story are all tasks the team can carry out quickly and confidently, without specialist technical support.
The entire site is available in both English and Spanish with the new platform supporting automated translation in conjunction with human quality assurance.
We worked iteratively with the Aquarium's marketing team throughout the build, incorporating their feedback into the CMS configuration sprint by sprint. The authoring environment is moulded to their needs, and can scale gracefully to meet their growing ambitions.
Working together
Cogapp's Agile methodology structured the project into focused two-week sprints. At the close of each sprint, the full Cogapp team demonstrated their work to colleagues at the Aquarium, with open sessions for questions and feedback. These sprint demos were recorded so that team members unable to attend could catch up in their own time.
Weekly video calls provided space for more discursive conversations, exploring ideas, addressing emerging questions, and ensuring that both teams remained aligned on priorities. Asynchronous feedback was gathered via our shared project management tools, creating a clear and searchable record of decisions and rationale throughout the project.
The distance between Brighton and Monterey is considerable, but the quality of collaboration between both teams made it immaterial.
Monterey Bay Aquarium website
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