The Innovate UK Catapult Network provides a unique combination of cutting-edge research and development facilities and world-class technical expertise to support UK business innovation. Their eleven Catapults work on everything from offshore renewable energy to medicines discovery.
But their digital presence didn’t reflect the innovation happening across the network. The Catapult websites had no consistency, and their CMS – Liferay – was expensive and difficult to customise. Several Catapults had already migrated to other systems, which had further pushed up costs.
Innovate UK needed a new approach – a flexible platform that could standardise the brand, maintain security and keep costs down, while giving each Catapult freedom to evolve. A way to properly promote and celebrate the incredible innovation happening across the UK.
The details
- Client: Innovate UK
- Project type: Website redevelopment
- Software: WordPress
- Industry: Public sector
Services delivered
- Discovery
- UX/UI design
- Technical development
- Support and maintenance
The challenges
Give the Catapults creative freedom without compromising consistency and security
Innovate UK needed to balance two things: give each Catapult flexibility to showcase their work and evolve their sites. But maintain brand standards and security across the network.
The challenge was that Catapults would use their own developers to customise their site. Innovate UK needed to make sure poor coding wouldn’t compromise security, robustness and resilience across the whole network. They needed cost-effective technical support across all the sites.
Create a powerful network, not just individual sites
The platform needed to do more than just host individual websites. Innovate UK wanted to build a connected network where the Catapults and Innovate UK could easily share news and events, promote available support and celebrate innovations.
Complex data migration
With 11 sites across two different content management systems, migrating all the content was going to be challenging. We would need to help Innovate UK and the individual Catapults decide on an approach that offered the best balance of effort, cost, and content quality.
Building relationships across complex stakeholder groups
We needed to develop commercial relationships across multiple Catapult organisations – some working through Innovate UK, others engaging with us directly. This meant navigating both direct and indirect client relationships while maintaining consistent service quality.
How we solved ORE Catapult’s challenges
The tech
Some Catapults had already migrated to WordPress, so it made sense to build the new network there. As an open-source platform, it kept costs down while giving each Catapult the flexibility to customise.
WordPress Multisite brought the brand and security guardrails Innovate UK needed. Advanced Custom Fields meant we could lock certain elements down and keep things consistent across all sites, while the shared media library gave all Catapults quick access to assets
A bespoke plugin for sharing news across the network
Innovate UK wanted to be able to share news and events across all Catapult sites – like a head office communicating with regional branches. No existing plugin could do this, so we built one.
Each Catapult could still publish their own news that stayed on their site. But the plugin allowed Innovate UK to share their own posts, or any individual Catapult posts, across the entire network. With a single click, the story would seamlessly appear across all 11 sites.
The process
Discovery and audit
First, we audited the existing sites – reviewing the content, technical setup, and what was working (or not working) across all the Catapult sites.
This audit led to a key decision: completely restructure the platform. The new setup would be more scalable and easier to launch sites on. Plus it would prevent the same problems – cost inefficiencies, inconsistencies and Catapults building their own sites – from happening again.
As part of that, we created a basic white-label WordPress theme that each Catapult could customise. This gave the Catapults creative freedom while maintaining the brand consistency, quality and security that Innovate UK needed across the network.
Quality assurance and second-line support for the Catapults
Once the new sites were live, we needed to help Innovate UK maintain standards. We provided second-line technical support for all the Catapult sites. If a Catapult had an issue, they’d contact Innovate UK first, who would pass technical problems to us.
But our role went beyond fixing problems. We acted as the brand and quality guardians for Innovate UK. When Catapults used their own developers or agencies, we made sure their work didn’t compromise security, performance or brand standards.
We also handled hosting, maintenance and security updates across all sites. This meant Innovate UK could keep everything secure and running smoothly, with any issues handled efficiently.
Customising the platform for individual Catapults
Once the platform was in place, several Catapults chose to work with us directly for customisation and migration. The Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult was one of them.
ORE had two existing websites that needed merging into one – a WordPress site and an Umbraco site. They needed help working out how to migrate all that content efficiently, and how to design a new site that actually reflected their groundbreaking renewable energy work.
We started with discovery at their Glasgow headquarters – workshops, interviews and card sorting exercises to understand what they really needed, not just what they currently had.
For migration, we took a strategic approach. Some content could be moved automatically using scripts. Other content needed humans to review and tweak it after migration. And some was easier to manually recreate from scratch. This mixed approach meant we could get rid of duplicate and outdated content, and only migrate what was actually useful.
We then designed and built the new site, including video features so ORE could showcase their research and use dynamic content for marketing.
This customisation work helped ORE transform their digital presence – it now finally reflects the innovative work they do.
The impact
Innovate UK now has a flexible, cost-effective platform that brings consistency and security across all the Catapult websites. Brand standards are maintained, and the network is both secure and connected. And both Innovate UK and the Catapults benefit now that support costs are spread across the board.
The new setup works for everyone. Several Catapults hired us directly for customisation and migration, while others used their own developers. And Innovate UK are confident that we are safeguarding quality and security across the network.
The platform now supports innovation rather than holding it back, giving Innovate UK control without stifling creativity, amplifying achievements across the network, and giving the Catapults the tools they need to promote their world-class research.