The brief
Cambridge Live Trust was for many years a charity based in Cambridge, operating the Cambridge Corn Exchange, the Cambridge Folk Festival, Cambridge Live Tickets (a local ticketing agency), and Cambridge City Events (the producer of free local events such as the Bonfire Night fireworks). More recently, Cambridge Live Trust was absorbed into Cambridge City Council, and as a result they needed to rebuild not just one website, but four —
The sticking point? Their budget only covered one website. And due to their previous content management system reaching end of life, they also needed to deliver all four new sites on a blisteringly tight timeline of just three months.
That’s where we came in.
1
One CMS
4
Four new websites
10
Ten week turnaround
Craft Multisite
As soon as we looked at the requirements for this project, we had one thought: Craft Multisite.
Craft is the CMS we use to build all our projects, because it’s flexible, secure, and really easy to use. But it also has a secret super-power: the ability to run many different related sites from a single place. Often this is used, for example, if a company wants to have localised versions of their website for different countries or languages. But to us it also seemed like the perfect tool for delivering the four new Cambridge Live websites quickly and economically.
So rather than separately designing four completely different sites, we used our limited discovery time to map out what features and components could be shared across all four of them — as well as anything that would be unique to just one of them. That allowed us to rapidly work up one core design that would work everywhere. As a result, the design phase didn’t require anything even close to what you’d need if you were designing four completely separate sites from scratch.
That doesn’t mean all four sites look the same! Certainly there’s a shared visual and UX language, but using shared layouts and clever conditional CSS meant that, again, the build phase wasn’t anything like you’d need for four completely separate websites. For example, we only had to build the event pages once behind the scenes, and then finished them off on the front end with just cosmetic changes. As a result, all four sites could have launched with that critical ticket-selling functionality after just two or three weeks of development.
Easier, quicker content population and editing
On any website project, building the site is only half the battle — and half the timeline. An equally mammoth task is for the client to actually get the content set up, ready for the site to go live. Obviously, when you’re talking about four separate websites, that content population phase is even more gargantuan still, yet with this project’s tight timeline, staff were only going to have a week or two to get it all done.
This was another reason why Craft Multisite was the perfect choice: because as well as sharing code, you can also set Multisite projects to share content.
So for example, when it came time to set up the page for Al Murray’s new comedy show — which would need to go on sale on both the Corn Exchange website and the Cambridge Live Tickets website — staff only needed to do that setup once. Craft Multisite then automatically published the page in both places, with the correct design and branding for each, without staff having to do anything extra.
Likewise, for other shared content like sponsorship opportunities, it was easy for staff to set up one page to publish everywhere at once. And better yet, multisite lets you configure shared content down to individual fields, meaning a page could have a different title on all four sites but the same description. Or the same title on all four sites, but with tailored descriptions for each audience.
Or, naturally, if there’s content that’s only relevant to one site — like Camping Information on the Folk Festival website — we’re able to restrict that to just the one site. That way, neither website visitors nor website editors will have their experience cluttered up with extra pages that simply aren’t necessary to them.
10 week turnaround
From our first discovery workshop at the beginning of October 2024, we were able to plan, design, build, and launch all four websites in just 10 weeks — leaving the client with nearly a month to spare before their previous CMS’s end-of-life deadline. We felt it was critical to build this cushion into the schedule, precisely because the turnaround times were so tight, so that there was ample time for any bugs to surface and get resolved before the point of no return. But thankfully that shakedown wasn’t necessary in the end, as the sites launched smoothly without any major issues.
Worlds better than it used to be
A "worlds better" experience
The new site solve some of the most pressing issues identified during discovery. For example, events with multiple performances per day used to require visitors to go to the Spektrix iframe and laboriously search through dates and times to find one with availability. Now, performances are presented in a series of elegant drop-downs on the event page itself, with availability clearly labelled.
We also added a load of new features to help visitors find events and plan their visit, like: event-search and filters; automatic links to venue locations on Google Maps; and clear accessibility information for each venue.
As a result, first-time customers who have never visited a Cambridge venue before instantly have all the information they need, all in one place.
In the words of the box office manager, “it’s worlds better than it used to be.”
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