Glasgow Life
History
They do this by delivering cultural, sporting and learning activities to the people of Glasgow and it's visitors.
From its humble beginnings back in 2006, Glasgow Life has grown to become the beating heart of the city, permeating almost all of the cultural, educational and sporting spectacles on offer.
For instance, sister organisation Glasgow Club helps manage the operations of sport and fitness centres in Glasgow, Tickets Glasgow facilitates the concert going public with a service for venues spread across the city and Glasgow Family History has enabled thousands of Glaswegians to learn about their past.
As part of our ongoing partnership we have assisted in the management of a broad array of events. These have include major sporting tournaments, bustling music festivals, 32 local libraries, 9 art galleries and 9 award-winning museums.
In 2017 we commenced a digital transformation programme for Glasgow Life, starting with the main web portal. Workshops were held with the core service areas to understand their individual business needs and objectives, alongside user research, analytics and content reviews, and analysis of the best technology with Umbraco being the preferred platform.
The new portal launched in Spring 2018. Following this, new sites were developed to support The World Pipe Band Championships and Festival 2018, supporting the European Championships 2018 held in Glasgow.
The next stages of the transformation programme include redevelopment of the remaining wider Glasgow Life digital estate in Umbraco as standalone sites or being added as destinations within the portal, with launches planned in 2019 and 2020.
The Objectives
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Glasgow Club
Glasgow Club operate and manage 30 sport and fitness centres in Glasgow. As part of their website design we utilised APIs from their leisure software to surface venue information and class timetables. -
Glasgow Family History
Glasgow Family History stores and facilitates the exploration of thousands of family trees relevant to the people of Glasgow. Our website design is integral to the easy access and navigation of those records. -
Glasgow Concert Halls
The Glasgow Concert Halls website offers a catalogue of all acts and events that can be searched and browsed easily via venue, date or artist. -
Tickets Glasgow
For the Tickets Glasgow website, we took what we created for the Glasgow Concert Halls one and built upon it. We done this by adding further functionality and by adding further Glasgow venues that didn’t fall within the concert hall bracket. -
Venue hire and Wedding venue hire
A website promoting the different venues available for hire depending on user’s requirements -
Ecommerce
The online shop for Glasgow Life hosts thousands of products. Each of these can be searched or ordered via events or venues that the products are linked to e.g Celtic Connections or Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. -
Kelvin Hall
A new destination website for Kelvin Hall: In partnership with National Libraries of Scotland and the University of Glasgow
The Process
Each year we also applied design refreshes and new features where relevant to their annual event sites. This included brand refreshes each year for the likes of Celtic Connections and Glasgow Mela and enhancing the events display to support larger volumes of traffic when applicable.
We developed a new events management system as events requirements evolved to include regular recurring events and different event occurrences. The events API was enhanced to feature the different events across all venues and festival sites and support the growing load on the service at peak launch periods.
We chose to migrate all of Glasgow Life and all of it’s affiliate sites from Sharepoint to Umbraco CMS for a number of reasons:
- Umbraco offers seamless user experience on one site even when another one on the server is going through the developing and deployment stages. This was important when different websites were going to be in use at different times of year and changes were being made (e.g. 2018 European Championships site being used in summer by users while amendments were being made to the Celtic Connections site for the coming winter).
- Umbraco allows for non-technical editors to alter the site if they need to. This could include adding content, customising the site layout or adding components to a page e.g. a location map, pull quotes or lightboxes.
This method of working allowed us to continuously build, test and deploy at regular intervals. This meant that we could quickly deliver improvements to production throughout the duration of projects and did not have to wait until all work was completed to see value. It also gave stakeholders the opportunity to review and give their feedback throughout the project lifecycle.
The way in which we modelled the architecture of certain sites afforded some benefits to the various charities. For example, there were various sites that, despite being separate from one another, pulled data from the same source, e.g. The Glasgow Concert Halls and Tickets Glasgow sites both pulled data from the same source on performance events that was used to populate areas of their sites.
Related projects
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