Manchester Cathedral Visitor Centre

Manchester Cathedral is one of the most interesting Cathedrals in the country, after surviving the IRA bomb and acquiring one of the oldest buildings in the city it was decided to be the first Cathedral in the country to have a Visitor Centre. The Centre was designed to have a full multimedia exhibition, conference facilities, a shop and a restaurant in the basement which was to house the only medieval scheduled monument in Manchester, the Hanging Bridge.

Work started on the centre in 2001 with completion in the summer of 2002, when it was opened by The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh. The Centre has been running since then, attracting lots of visitors, as well as a lot of conference trade in it’s four conference rooms.

The Centre, along with the Cathedral, had a website built just after opening, but due to time and costs the site wasn’t updated with new information and news. The Cathedral decided to commission a new website for themselves, leaving the Visitor Centre without an up to date site to advertise themselves. We were approached to design a site for that purpose, with a good brief from the Managing Director we got to work on a site which suited the brief. The main aim of the site is to get more people through the door, wither it be visitors of the shop, exhibition or restaurant. But also to help the conference trade continue to grow.

Some of the interesting features discussed where some way of putting up late availability for the conference rooms, on-line booking and on-line shopping. The client also needed to be able to update some areas of the site, for example: prices and menus, quite regually. We decided to use Adobe Contribute for this, which allows the client to edit areas of the site using a user friendly and easy to use program, with no technical experience of HTML or any other website languages – just English!

After initial designs the client gave the go ahead to produce the full site. In early September the website became live, with over 40 pages of information and images. After a month of monitoring traffic and feedback from visitors we brainstormed some new ideas for the site, which was currently mainly static pages. Work was started on an online booking form which allowed conference bookers to fill in data online and have a booking form (a word document) sent to the Centre, as well as an option to send a copy to themselves. This became a great success and more and more people are choosing to use this option when booking at the Centre. One of the main advantages of this is that the Centre gets the required information easily, and also the person booking the conference is required to declare that they have understood and agreed with the terms and conditions of booking, which has been a problem in the past for the Centre.

In late October, we were asked to design and produce a system for late availability of the conference rooms, the brief was to create a system that would allow the staff to enter free dates into the site to be displayed and emailed to prospective clients. The system is fully automatic and only requires input twice a month from the Centre, to update the available rooms, this has become very popular for many of the bigger companies that use the Centre, bringing in many new bookings.

We continue to manage the website and update it periodically, more advancements on the site will be posted later.

You can visit the site at www.mcvc.info