Last week Manchester Cathedral hosted the Annual Deans’ Conference. This event takes place every year at a different host city, this year the host Cities where Manchester and Blackburn. Deans of Cathedrals all over the country descended on Manchester to take part in meetings and learn more about Manchester and the surrounding area. The theme of the conference was Regeneration, Manchester being a prize example of this. The conference had guest speakers from Manchester City Council, BBC North and Salford Central Regeneration, all of the Deans seamed to fully enjoy the conference and get a great deal that they could take away with them to their respective Cities.

With our on going partnership with Manchester Cathedral we were asked to firstly produce the booking form for the event. This would be sent out to the Deans from around the country and would need to be easy to fill in but also gather as much information as possible about the attendees and what they would like to do with their stay in Manchester. The feedback from the form we produced was great, it allowed to office staff to process the data quickly and gather all the information they needed in one place.

We were also asked to produce a simple menu for the conference farewell dinner, held on the Wednesday night in the Cathedral itself. The menu included a running order, the menu, a small biography about the guest speaker Dom Antony Sutch and a page for sponsors of the event. The menu was finished with a cream card outer and a plain white inner, including the sheild for the Cathedral and a clean finish.

The menu was produced so that each member of the conference dinner had a copy and the feedback from the menu was great. The meal went down really well and the overall evening was a success. We look forward to working with the Cathedral for more projects of this type.

That’s all for now.

J

We are pleased to announce the launch of the X-Fire Design Labs. The labs is the area of our site that we have set aside for current developments and work in progress. Many of our clients have been asking for this for a while, and we have finally found a great way of implementing it. It allows us to showcase our current experiments, and creates an easy place for all our clients to find their projects that we are currently working on.

The Labs can be accessed by visiting labs.x-fire.co.uk or using the link on the main website. Each client will have a folder with their current work in, which can be password protected if you would like. All of the artwork we create, and pages we code, will be put into these files so that you can download anything you need right from our website. When a new website is being coded it will be uploaded here for testing and proofing before uploaded to the final server, this gives us chance to make sure that everything is working great before we go live.

In the coming months you will see this area of the site quickly fill up, as more and more projects come in. We will also be experimenting with a few projects of our own, which will appear at some time so keep a look out!

Thats all for now, I would also like to take the chance to wish you all (a little late) happy New Year, 2010 is going to be great!

J

With our recent work with the visitor centre for the Cathedral we were approached to help solve a problem some of the development staff where having. A 400 page document had been produced discussing the various options and ways to develop the Cathedral and raise the money to make the changes.

The Cathedral has set up various groups, which meet regularly to talk about how the design is progressing, and the Director of Fundraising & Development, Anthony O’Connor was required to distribute the document to all of the parties involved in these various groups.

Rather than print 50 copies of a 400 word document, costing a lot of money (and trees!), he decided to put the file on to CD Rom. We were asked to firstly secure the document so that it could not be copied, and then produce a CD cover to make the package look professional.

We took this a stage further and produced a CD Auto-run program which greeted the user and allowed them to view the document, as well as install the required software (Adobe Player) to view it if required. The finish product is currently being distributed to everyone involved, and the feedback is good, form a design point of view, and an environmental one too. We look forward to working with the Cathedral more over the coming year.

J

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