How we created a diverse online arts home for Falmouth University
Falmouth University is a leading creative institution, renowned for innovation in arts, design, media, and technology. Lecturers and staff wanted to share their work online, and many had created their own separate websites. This meant no consistency, no security control, and mounting costs for the university to manage.
The university needed a single platform that would give their creatives the freedom to build their own sites while keeping everything secure, consistent, and cost-effective. The challenge was creating something powerful enough for complex multimedia projects, yet simple enough for anyone to use.
The details
- Client: Falmouth University
- Project type: Website
- Software: WordPress Multisite
- Industry: Higher education
Services delivered
- UX/UI design
- Technical development
- Delivery management
- Support and maintenance
The challenges
Flexible enough for creative expression
Falmouth’s creatives needed flexibility – some wanted their own standalone site, while others wanted space to showcase a project on the central AIR hub. Each space needed to be able to handle diverse types of content, from interactive art experiments to research findings and everything in between. And because much of the content was image and video heavy, we needed to make sure it always looked great on any device.
Easy for non-technical users to use
Project owners – mostly university lecturers and support staff – needed to be able to publish and maintain their areas with ease. The solution had to be intuitive and simple to use, but controlled enough that the university could manage access and users couldn’t break things.
A tight budget
We needed to find cost-effective solutions that could still deliver the complex functionality they needed. This meant maximising the use of standard tools and customising where necessary to give them a tailored solution.
The ability to search across multiple sites
AIR projects spanned everything from collaborative research, to performance, to photography, music and events. With content scattered across independent sites and the central AIR hub, the university needed a way to connect people with content from across the entire network.
How we solved Falmouth University’s challenges
The tech
WordPress multisite to balance creative freedom, control and cost efficiency
WordPress multisite was the natural choice. Users could create, edit and publish content easily, either within the central hub or on their own independent site. This let Falmouth University control security and maintain brand standards across everything, slashed costs by bringing all hosting and maintenance under one roof, and reduced training needs because many staff already knew WordPress.
Making it easy to use while keeping control
We customised the platform to give project owners the options they needed, without letting them break things. Custom post types and flexible templates made sure all the different types of content looked good. We set up user roles (including “super editors”) so only the right people could make major changes. And we simplified the content management interface to hide complexities, making it easy to upload multimedia content and hard to go off-brand.
Custom tags and modules to connect content across the network
We created custom tags so project owners could label their work by topic – things like “performance” or “collaborative research.” This meant related projects could be linked together automatically, even if they lived on different sites across the network.
We then built a custom module that could pull tagged content from across all the sites and display it on the central hub. Combined with a global, relevancy-based search, this helped people discover related work across the entire network that they wouldn’t otherwise know existed.
The process
Planning for control and cost efficiency
We started with an inception phase to gather all requirements and understand exactly what Falmouth needed. This fed into a detailed project specification document that set out what we’d build, how it would work, and who could do what. This was crucial for getting the user permissions structure and taxonomies right, and making sure that we delivered the best value within their budget.
Building and testing in phases
We then moved into the build phase. For a creative institution like Falmouth, visual design was critical, so we focused first on getting the look and feel signed off. A phased approach meant we could test components as we built them, and make sure each element of the platform was working as it should. Throughout the build we had daily calls to keep the whole team updated and handle changes quickly.
The impact
The new platform delivered everything Falmouth University needed – a connected, consistent and cost-effective solution that balanced creative freedom with control.
The university’s creatives had the tools and freedom to showcase and promote their work, while the university had peace of mind that everything would stay on-brand, and costs would stay controlled. With projects better connected, users could see what was happening across the entire network. This transformed the AIR hub into the go-to space for Falmouth’s creative community, successfully bringing together more than 40 diverse projects in one place.