How Army Museum Lahore went from zero digital presence to a fully operational, 7-language national institution website — built and launched in under 4 months

Client: Army Museum Lahore Industry: Government / Cultural Heritage
Location: Lahore, Pakistan
Use Case: Build a complete digital presence from scratch for a national military heritage institution serving a multilingual Pakistani audience

Army Museum Lahore is Pakistan's premier military heritage institution, housing 11 galleries that document the nation's history from partition through the wars of 1965 and 1971, the Siachen conflict, and the ongoing war against terrorism. The museum serves school groups, general visitors, researchers, and dignitaries — drawing audiences from across every province and linguistic background in the country.

Despite the scale and national significance of the institution, it had no digital presence whatsoever. No website, no online ticketing information, no way for schools to research or book educational tours, and no photography archive to represent what is physically one of the most compelling heritage spaces in the country.

The Challenge

No digital assets existed The museum had never commissioned professional photography. Every gallery, artefact, diorama, and external display existed only in physical form. Before a single line of code could be written, the entire museum needed to be documented visually from scratch.

A genuinely multilingual audience Pakistan is a country of six major regional languages alongside English. A website built only in English — or even only in Urdu — would fail to serve large portions of the museum's intended audience. The requirement was clear: the website needed to function fully in Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto, Balochi, Sindhi, Kashmiri, and English. This is not a cosmetic translation task. It requires right-to-left script rendering, regional font handling, and a content architecture maintainable by a non-technical team.

Institutional depth at scale The museum's content is extensive — 11 thematic galleries, internal displays, external exhibits, educational tours, monthly school visit archives, ticketing, visitor instructions, careers, and event coverage. Structuring all of this into a navigable, maintainable website required serious information architecture work.

The Approach

Visual content production — before the build

With no photography assets in existence, we took full ownership of the visual documentation process. Our team conducted a complete on-site photography session across the entire museum — all 11 galleries, internal displays, external hardware exhibits, and the surrounding grounds — using a OnePlus 7T. Working with a smartphone across vastly different lighting environments required genuine photographic judgment: managing natural light in open galleries, artificial lighting on artefact cases, and wide-angle composition in confined spaces. The result was a complete, high-quality image library that now powers the entire website.

Full website design and development

We designed and developed the website on WordPress, chosen for its flexibility with multilingual plugins and its accessibility for a non-technical client team managing ongoing content updates. The information architecture was built around the museum's three core audience types — school groups booking educational tours, general visitors checking tickets and opening hours, and researchers browsing gallery content — and structured so each audience finds what they need without friction.

7-language multilingual implementation

The multilingual build was the most technically demanding element of the project. We implemented full content delivery across all seven languages — Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto, Balochi, Sindhi, Kashmiri, and English — with proper right-to-left rendering for Nastaliq-script languages and consistent typographic quality across all regional variants. Every language version carries the full site structure, not a reduced or partial translation, ensuring every Pakistani visitor receives the same depth of content regardless of their first language.

Content writing and structuring

Gallery descriptions, visitor information, educational tour details, and institutional copy were written and structured from scratch. This covered 11 galleries spanning 9,000 years of history — from the Indus Valley Civilisation through partition, the wars of 1965 and 1971, Siachen, and counter-terrorism operations — translated into clear, accessible web copy appropriate for school-age visitors and adult audiences alike.

Results

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