Making the complex simple for the Southbank Centre site rebuild

Challenge

With four main venues and an average of 3,000 events each year, Southbank Centre is the largest arts centre in the UK and one of the nation's top five visitor attractions.

With their website's content management system (CMS) becoming outdated, the team at Southbank Centre wanted to upgrade their legacy site before support ended. They also recognised an opportunity to streamline the complexity of selling their large number of events while optimising the experience for attendees. Together with Dutch creative agency Today Tomorrow, we supported the centre in the complex rebuild of their website.

Solution

Along with an upgrade from the outdated Drupal 7 CMS system, Southbank Centre wanted to align the site with their new visual identity to showcase the brand. The site also needed to act as a strong foundation, allowing them to adapt to a digital landscape that supports their digital marketing efforts.

We focused on a design that was simple to view, navigate and use, and was also simple to edit. This new website is designed to show visitors the right content at the right time while being visually striking.

Landing pages have been created with customisation functionality for editors looking to design visually attractive event pages beyond rigid template restrictions, adapt layouts for different art forms or venues, add price promotions or customise membership messaging. The CMS is supported by a component-based structure that offers editors a lot of freedom to add content, order pages and edit information from the event system we integrated with.

Event data is pulled from the Southbank Centre’s existing Artifax system, and media from digital asset management system Bynder. For ticket booking and user accounts we integrated the site with the centre’s ticketing solution.

Impact

With many visitors and different behaviours, third-party ticketing systems & digital asset management, robust filtering requirements for event listings and a large volume of event types, the functionality of the new site translates into a seamless experience for visitors and site editors.

Visitors on both desktop and mobile have found the new site easier to navigate, more fitting to the brand and a better tool to decide what event to visit. The new site’s flexibility has also allowed the Southbank Centre to adapt with speed in response to the Covid-19 crisis that resulted in many event cancellations. Offering broadcast events online, the ability to reach global audiences digitally and diversify their revenue streams, all without the need for additional development or build investment.

We’re delighted to have collaboratively built a visually impactful website that is both simple and enjoyable to use, whilst being underpinned by a robust and scalable technical foundation.