Public Sector Web Portals Team Augmentation Back-end SLA Support

One Website, Five Galleries: A Multi-Site Museum Website

For Slovak National Gallery

A visitor seen from behind looking at a large abstract painting in a sunlit gallery hall. Image generated with AI.

Overview

The Slovak National Gallery runs five galleries across Slovakia. BRACKETS joined its in-house digital team through a public tender to rebuild sng.sk, then stayed on for almost three years of development and support.

sng.sk homepage on desktop and mobile, with a site-wide notice, the "Open until 17:00" status and a current exhibition

The Challenge

One website for a gallery with many front doors.

The Slovak National Gallery is the country's national art institution, operating under the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic, with five galleries across Slovakia, including the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava, Zvolen Castle and Mansion Strážky.

SNG is not one building. Each gallery has its own opening hours, address, exhibitions and programme, and visitors arrive looking for one specific place. The previous site did not reflect that.

SNG's Department of Digital Collections and Services wanted a new platform that would make the gallery easier to visit, simplify the information architecture and connect content that lived in separate places. Its in-house digital team already ran a strong product practice, with a product manager, its own developers and a UX/UI designer working in Figma. What it needed was senior development capacity that could work inside its process rather than replace it.

The tender set clear technical expectations:

A modern frontend (TypeScript, Vue.js, Tailwind CSS) on a Laravel backend

Automated CI/CD, static checks and tests

Accessibility in line with WCAG 2.1 AA and Slovak public-sector web rules

Protection against standard attacks such as XSS, CSRF and SQL injection

All code published to SNG's own Git repository

How We Worked

Working as part of SNG's team.

We worked in sprints planned and estimated together with SNG, as an extension of its in-house team.

SNG Owned the Roadmap

Its product manager set priorities, its designer delivered Figma files, and its developers took part in estimates and code review.

Every Sprint Ended the Same Way

With a demo, a design review against Figma and a round of testing.

One Shared Channel

Day-to-day communication ran on a shared Slack channel.

Code in SNG's Repository

All code lived in SNG's repository from day one, with automated deployment to development and staging. SNG's own developers could open pull requests for us to review and deploy.

The Platform

A platform built around galleries.

The core idea was the workspace: every gallery is a workspace with its own opening hours, address, GPS location, social links and footer. Exhibitions, events and pages are assigned to a workspace, and the site adapts to the gallery a visitor has chosen.

Opening hoursWe're open

A live status that reads each gallery's opening hours.

ProgrammeWhat's on

Exhibitions and events with two levels of filtering, by category and by time period.

ExhibitionsExhibition detail

Curators, exhibiting artists, related events, an info box with hours and prices, and exhibited works in a lightbox.

TicketsTicket purchase

Linked from exhibitions, events and the main navigation.

NavigationSK + EN

A megamenu, a gallery switcher and a full Slovak and English version.

EditorsAdmin

Workspaces, promo texts, site-wide notices, price list templates, redirects, user permissions and media management with automatic image processing.

Launch and Beyond

Growing the platform after launch.

Before launch we optimised page speed, worked through accessibility fixes, set up server-side rendering, automated production deployment with GitHub Actions, and connected analytics.

After the new site went live, SNG commissioned two more rounds of work:

Service and development (2023–2024). A 12-month contract combining SLA support with development capacity for new features, released through December 2023. From then on, SNG's own developers built new features, with BRACKETS reviewing their pull requests and consulting on request.

Ongoing support (2024–2025). A 12-month SLA covering hosting, monitoring, error tracking and incident response, plus change requests such as school group reservations, collection detail adjustments and a Google Tag Manager data layer.

The Handover

A clean handover.

In 2025, SNG took the platform fully into its own hands. We handed over source code, repositories, configuration, technical and user documentation and the full record of changes and deployments. Because the code had lived in SNG's repository all along, the handover was a formality rather than a migration.

The Results

A new sng.sk, live in 2023.

The rebuilt site went live within the first contract, including production setup and automated deployment.

One site that works for all five galleries. Visitors pick a gallery and see its hours, programme and directions. Editors manage all of them from one admin.

Exhibitions are easier to explore and to visit. Filters, rich exhibition pages and ticket links sit on every relevant page.

A platform SNG kept building on. The first project led to two more contracts and almost three years of continuous work.

Full ownership stayed with SNG. The gallery holds its code, documentation and infrastructure knowledge, and now runs the platform itself.

5 galleries One website, one admin

SK + EN Fully bilingual website

3 years From public tender to handover

FAQ

The Slovak National Gallery (Slovenská národná galéria, SNG) is Slovakia's national art institution, with more than seventy years of history. It is a state institution under the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic and runs five galleries: the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava, Zvolen Castle in Zvolen, Mansion Strážky in Spišská Belá, The Schaubmar Mill in Pezinok and the Ľudovít Fulla Gallery in Ružomberok.

As an extension of it. SNG's product manager set priorities, its designer supplied Figma files and its developers joined estimates and code review. We planned sprints together and committed all code to SNG's repository.

PHP 8.2 and Laravel 9 on the backend, Vue 3 on the frontend, PostgreSQL 15, with CI/CD on GitHub Actions and error tracking in Sentry.

Development started in November 2022. The new site launched in 2023, and the work continued under two more contracts until a formal handover in 2025.

Hosting on a virtual server, database and storage, application monitoring, error tracking in Sentry, CI/CD and incident response with agreed reaction and resolution times on working days from 9:00 to 17:00.

We plan for it from the start: code in the client's repository, documented deployments and a formal handover of code, access, configuration and documentation.

In Production

See live

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