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Manchester Central wanted its website to communicate the full range of experiences and spaces available at its landmark venue. The project was an opportunity to improve the editing experience, reconsider the site’s structure and help prospective customers understand the venue before contacting its sales team.
Following an open tender, Big Blue Door began the project in February 2021. Working with Manchester Central’s marketing team and senior stakeholders, the agency reviewed existing research, developed the user experience and visual design, and delivered a new Drupal 9 website.
The site launched on 22 June 2021 to coincide with the venue’s reopening following the pandemic. Big Blue Door’s work extended beyond launch into hosting, support, maintenance and platform upgrades, including subsequent Drupal 10 updates.
Business case and background
Manchester Central occupies the former Manchester Central railway station. Its vaulted arches and station clock give it a distinctive presence in the city, while its different event spaces serve a broad range of organisers, exhibitors and visitors.
The existing website had been in place for several years and used Drupal 7. Manchester Central needed a more modern publishing platform, stronger presentation of its facilities and better connections between the website and its booking arrangements. The timing gave the project particular significance: the venue was preparing to welcome events again after the disruption of Covid-19.
The commercial ambition went beyond presenting attractive photographs. Manchester Central wanted potential customers to arrive at conversations with its sales team better informed about what the venue could offer. It also wanted a platform for sharing insight and demonstrating its expertise within the events industry.
Big Blue Door built on competitor analysis, brand development and initial audience work undertaken by Ensemble. That existing foundation informed further discovery and design, with Manchester Central contributing operational knowledge and responsibility for populating the new site’s content.
About the project
Building on existing research
Manchester Central brought initial personas, service-design thinking and competitor research to the project. Big Blue Door reviewed this material and developed it through stakeholder interviews, including engagement with the venue’s then Chief Executive.
The team explored what different audiences needed from the website and the actions they wanted to take. Visitors needed practical information about attending events; organisers needed to understand the venue’s possibilities; exhibitors had their own service and operational requirements. The work identified pain points in room-booking and contact journeys and informed a revised information architecture.
Experience mapping and Miro-based structural work helped connect those needs with the organisation of the site. Clickable wireframes in Figma made the proposed journeys tangible, allowing the Manchester Central team to review and refine them before development.
A visual experience shaped around the venue
Big Blue Door developed the creative concept and interactive prototypes across desktop, tablet and mobile layouts. The design gave Manchester Central a distinctive digital presence, using colour, photography and motion to communicate the character of the venue.
An animated homepage created an engaging introduction. Big Blue Door used Lottie as part of its animation approach, with attention to asset size and an editable lead image. Video and virtual tours complemented the design, helping prospective customers explore the venue and its range of spaces remotely.
The design also gave individual audiences clear starting points. Dedicated visitor, organiser and exhibitor areas connected the visual showcase with information relevant to each group, while space listings and room information helped customers explore the available facilities.
Rebuilding the content experience
The new site used a Paragraphs-based approach to publishing. Instead of relying on a small set of rigid pages, editors could compose content from reusable building blocks within the site’s design.
During the project, Big Blue Door and Manchester Central agreed that a direct migration of the old Drupal 7 content would not make the best use of the new platform. The revised information architecture and component-based layouts called for a fresh approach to content population.
Manchester Central therefore populated the new website around the new structure. This was a deliberate delivery decision: it allowed the team to organise and present information for the redesigned journeys rather than reproduce the legacy site’s structure.
Connecting discovery with enquiry and booking
The website needed to help people move from exploring the venue towards contacting the right team. Big Blue Door examined booking and contact journeys and developed the design around those decisions. The original project artwork includes a booking decision tree and a guided event-enquiry concept that asks about the scale of an event.
The delivery also included re-theming Manchester Central’s existing Ungerboeck booking system and integrating virtual tours. These elements connected the public-facing showcase with the venue’s established operational tools and helped present its spaces in more depth.
Delivery and milestones
The project began in February 2021, with a kick-off meeting on 2 February. Big Blue Door used an iterative approach, with weekly design sprints, clickable prototypes and regular feedback from the client team. Basecamp and Slack supported communication during delivery.
Discovery and information architecture informed the creative work, followed by Drupal development, content population and user acceptance testing. The website went live on 22 June 2021, aligned with the venue’s reopening. This gave Manchester Central a new digital presence at an important point in its return to in-person events.
Hosting and support after launch
Big Blue Door hosted the service on AWS in the London region. The documented infrastructure used autoscaling to accommodate changing traffic levels, a CDN for content delivery, and separate availability zones for backup and disaster-recovery arrangements. Jenkins supported automated deployments.
Outcome
Manchester Central gained a redesigned Drupal website that combined a distinctive visual identity with more flexible publishing and clearer audience journeys. The delivery replaced the legacy Drupal 7 implementation, introduced reusable page components and brought animation, virtual tours and booking-system re-theming into the wider experience.
The project gave the marketing team a platform for presenting the venue’s spaces and expertise, while providing visitors, organisers and exhibitors with dedicated routes into relevant information.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal provided a flexible foundation for a content-rich venue website with varied audiences, substantial visual content and connections to an established booking system. Moving from Drupal 7 to a new Drupal 9 implementation allowed Big Blue Door to reconsider the content model and user experience while retaining an open-source CMS at the centre of the solution.
A key requirement was to give the marketing team more freedom to build and maintain pages. Big Blue Door used Paragraphs to support reusable components that could be assembled into different page layouts. This approach suited the mix of audience hubs, venue information, event-space showcases and supporting editorial content.
Drupal also accommodated the project’s visual ambitions. The site combined the venue’s identity with animation, video and integrated virtual tours, while the existing Ungerboeck booking system was re-themed as part of the wider experience.
The choice supported a website that could continue to evolve after launch. Big Blue Door subsequently maintained Drupal core and modules and delivered further updates, including work on Drupal 10 during the support period.
Technical Specifications
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