Falmouth University AIR Portal - a home for new ideas

About Falmouth University 

Falmouth University is a specialist public university for the creative industries based in Falmouth, Cornwall. It is a leading creative institution, renowned for its innovation in the arts, design, media, and technology.

Background 

Falmouth wanted to provide its staff with a platform where they could publish and showcase their diverse range of projects, all in one centralised location. From interactive art experiments to blogs and full scale websites, the platform needed to support a variety of content, whilst all being managed by the same CMS - and of course, be easy to use.

University lecturers and support staff wanted to publish and edit content easily and it was likely that most contributors would be non-technical, so the platform had to be intuitive. Independent project owners needed to be able to publish and maintain their areas with ease, all within Falmouth’s ‘AIR’ portal.

WordPress was the natural choice, as many of the staff were already familiar with it. But with the need for multiple formats, an extensive content network and bespoke search functionality, the challenge was set!

The Challenge

Bringing creativity together under one roof—that was the client's goal. The platform needed to:

• Aggregate content across multiple sites

• Feature a global, relevancy-based search

• Be fully responsive for all devices

• Fit within a tight budget

Great ideas need room to grow, so how do you create a single platform that’s powerful enough to handle complex multimedia projects yet simple enough for anyone to use? 

Enter, Team Affinity. 

The Solution

Affinity built a WordPress Multisite platform which gave users the ability to create, edit and publish content effortlessly. We hid the complexities of the CMS and presented University staff with a user-friendly interface that even non-technical users could navigate with ease.

To bring it all together, we:

Deployed custom modules to aggregate content across the network ✔

Created global search facility for easy discovery ✔

Designed a fully responsive site for mobile, tablet, and desktop ✔

Implemented custom widgets, post types and taxonomies, for flexibility ✔

By keeping the CMS simple and intuitive, staff were able to upload and edit multimedia content themselves - no training required! Reducing costs and maximising creativity. 

The Results

The new platform delivered on everything that Falmouth Uni needed - a unified, cost effective solution that could showcase a wide range of projects all in one place. 

The site became the go-to space for Falmouth’s creative community, used to successfully promote many inspiring university projects.

Another challenge solved. Another happy client.