Sector(s)
The Maison de la Culture Famenne-Ardenne (MCFA) is a leading cultural venue in Marche-en-Famenne, Belgium, running a dense programme of shows, concerts, exhibitions and workshops. To support audience growth and bring visitors closer to its ticketing, the MCFA fully redesigned its website on Drupal.
WebstanZ led the project and handled the technical build, in partnership with Tentwelve, a studio specialising in cultural platforms.
About the project
The challenge
The brief was explicit and measurable: move beyond an institutional showcase toward a discovery-and-conversion tool, with targets including a +20% increase in ticketing conversion, +25% newsletter sign-ups, a mobile bounce rate under 40%, and a mobile Lighthouse score of at least 80 — all delivered on a tight timeline (go-live in early June).
The core requirement: a frictionless path from discovery to booking. Home → Agenda → Event page → Ticketing in three clicks or fewer, with the agenda acting as the central conversion driver rather than a static listing.
The solution
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A reusable agenda as a content engine. Events are modelled as structured content and surfaced automatically across the site through a Layout Builder–integrated block, filtered by category. Content is entered once and displayed anywhere relevant — thematic pages, age-specific sections (e.g. teen programming), or per-venue listings, always in sync.
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Ticketing integration (Utick). Events are pulled automatically from the Utick API, which remains the source of truth for dates, schedules, venues and availability. Editorial teams then enrich each event on the site (visuals, video, cast, partners). Real-time statuses - sold out, last seats, postponed/cancelled, past event - are displayed on listings and event pages.
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Editorial autonomy. A Layout Builder–based page-building experience with in-context editing lets the communications team assemble pages from content blocks and see results immediately, with no dependency on the agency for routine updates. Media library, drafts, preview and scheduled publishing are included.
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Filterable discovery. Combinable facets (event type, audience, recommended age, venue, date/period, keywords) make the programme easy to explore, with featured events, related-event suggestions and automatic archiving of past events.
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Search, newsletter and SEO. Full-text search with typo tolerance and content weighting; Mailchimp sign-up integration with contextual call-to-action blocks; clean URLs, meta tag management, XML sitemap and 301 redirects from the legacy site to preserve rankings.
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Mobile-first and accessibility. Built mobile-first against WCAG best practices (contrast, heading hierarchy, keyboard navigation, alt text), with internal AnySurfer-certified expertise.
Outcome
The site launched as a complete, stable V1 (MVP) within the planned window, with secondary features (interactive map, full legacy-content migration) scoped for a later V2. It is now live and serves as the central pillar of the MCFA's digital presence.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was the natural fit for a cultural site combining structured content (events, venues, projects, pages), external integrations, editorial autonomy and performance requirements. Its content modelling, granular access control and mature contributed-module ecosystem allowed us to concentrate effort on UX, design and integration rather than rebuilding core functionality.
Rather than starting from a blank slate, we built on an existing Drupal cultural boilerplate, which de-risked the timeline and let the team focus on what actually differentiates the site.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
