Sector(s)
Team Members
Manchester Central is an award-winning conference venue in one of Europe’s most vibrant cities. With the capacity to handle large-scale conferences and exhibitions, the state-of-the-art venue hosts some of the world’s leading international events.
The previous website was dated and needed significant design and usability improvements to improve its appeal to the international conference audience.
Manchester Central commissioned PRWD - an online user experience specialist - to define user personas and complete an extensive user experience research report and competitor analysis. And CTI Digital - a full service digital agency - to collaborate with PRWD to complete a full project brief for the development and hosting of the website including style tile, wireframes and functional specification.
About the project
The primary goal of Manchester Central’s new website was to attract an international audience of conference organisers. To achieve this, it was essential that the website delivered a world-class experience throughout; design, functionality, user journeys and content all needed to be executed meticulously.
The website needed to confidently communicate to prominent conference organisers that Manchester Central has the heritage, reputation, facilities and attention to deal required to host international events and conferences.
This posed a particularly challenging user experience problem; international conference organisers represent less than 0.01% of Manchester Central’s audience, what about the other 99.99%?
Why Drupal was chosen
The planning and strategy phase of the project yielded an extensive functional specification. Due to the relationship that developed during the planning process, the brief wasn’t put out to tender, CTI Digital were appointed to completed the design and build. As a technology focused digital agency CTI Digital considered a number of options including; Drupal, Wordpress, Zend Framework and Django.
Drupal was chosen for the following reasons;
- The majority of the features required for the project were out-of-the-box in Drupal including; multi user profiles (organisers, exhibitors and visitors), downloads, media and menus.
- Contributed modules including Views, Rules, Date, Menu, Search and Gmap were particularly useful for creating a visually appealing, rich media experience.
- Drupal has one of the biggest, most vibrant, and responsive open source communities with a knowledge database to mine and learn from.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
A key focus of the site are the visual aspects, allowing Manchester Central to vividly illustrate the venue and its many assets. Views with the Views Slideshow plugin allowed us to easily implement the slideshows and gallery displays that appear throughout the site.
Rules was used rules predominantly to assign one of the 3 site audience roles based on data entered by a user upon sign-up.
GMap was used to easily create and manage google maps generated from node content for pages like Accommodation and Restaurants.
Google Analytics was chosen because of the importance of usage stats to monitor and improve the website's performance.
