HOME is Manchester's flagship contemporary arts centre – a purpose-built £25m building designed by Dutch architects Mecanoo, sitting at the heart of the First Street creative quarter. It houses a year-round producing theatre, five cinema screens, gallery exhibitions, artist development, and social spaces all under one roof. Since opening in 2015, it has welcomed millions of visitors with programming that runs beyond the mainstream.
A venue built with this level of ambition deserves a digital presence that can serve its diverse audience and their eclectic tastes.
The numbers speak for themselves
When HOME's new site launched in March 2025, Lighthouse testing showed significant gains:
Performance up 35%: pages load faster and interactions feel smoother, particularly important when nearly three-quarters of HOME's traffic comes from mobile devices.
Accessibility improved 11%: the site now works better for visitors using screen readers and other assistive technologies, ensuring HOME's digital front door is open to everyone.
Best Practices now perfect: a clean bill of health for security, performance, and how the site behaves across different browsers and devices.
Within six months of launch, HOME saw a 6% shift from box office to web sales. It's a clear sign that visitors find the new site easier to use and trust the online booking journey.
One venue, many audiences
Our Discovery process began with in-person sessions at HOME, where we mapped out just how many different audience types the website needed to serve, and how differently each group behaves.
A cinema-goer wants to see what's showing tonight and book in seconds. A theatre-goer wants reviews, cast information, and running times before committing. An artist wants commissioning opportunities. A family wants to know about relaxed performances and pushchair access. A member wants to check their benefits and find their digital card.
Each of these audiences arrive with different goals, different patience thresholds, and different definitions of success.
Through UX research and analytics analysis, we identified where the previous site was creating friction for these groups. Navigation presented too many options at once – what UX researchers call "choice paralysis" – making it hard for visitors to quickly scan and find what they needed. Critical information like ticket prices, parking, and access support was buried deep within pages. Oversized hero images pushed actual content below the fold, creating particular problems for the 72.6% of HOME's visitors browsing on mobile. And key membership information was stored as images rather than text, making it invisible to screen readers.
The technical metrics confirmed what the user experience suggested: a site that was functional, but working against HOME’s patrons rather than for them.
What we built
HOME's new CultureSuite-powered website brings together their complex offering into a coherent, accessible digital experience – shaped through collaborative workshops where we worked directly with their team to find the right solutions.
Seamless Spektrix integration
HOME's events and key information now pull automatically from their Spektrix ticketing system via our event updater. No more duplicating work across platforms. The marketing team can manage their entire web presence from a single CMS, with event data, pricing, and availability always in sync. The first major on-sale after launch ran noticeably smoother than previous experiences.
Simplified navigation
The overwhelming mega-menu was replaced with a clearer structure organised around how visitors actually think about the venue: What's On, Visit, Support, and About. This led to fewer clicks to the information that matters.
Smarter event browsing
With cinema, theatre, exhibitions, and events all living on one site, visitors can now filter by genre, type, or format to quickly find what interests them. No more scrolling through theatre listings to find tonight's film.
Mobile-first approach
With nearly three-quarters of traffic coming from mobile devices, the new site prioritises that experience rather than treating it as an afterthought. Pages load faster, content appears above the fold, and the booking journey works properly on a phone screen.
Designed for accessibility
Proper text formatting replaced image-based content, colour contrast was improved, and the site was built to meet current accessibility standards. The 11% improvement in accessibility scores reflects real changes that make HOME's digital front door open to everyone.
Content flexibility
HOME's marketing team can now update content quickly without requiring external support, giving them creative control to respond to opportunities as they arise. Content blocks can even be scheduled to go live automatically, such as when a season announcement or on-sale is set for the weekend.
The relationship didn't end at launch though. Working with CultureSuite means HOME gets lasting infrastructure, not a flash-in-a-pan project. HOME's team have access to ongoing support such as quick responses to queries, training sessions tailored to their needs, and the knowledge that when they identify an improvement, the entire CultureSuite Community benefits.
What HOME said
"Working with CultureSuite has been a transformational investment for HOME. We're now delivering a significantly improved user experience for our audiences, and we've seen a clear increase in web sales as a result. When we made the decision to launch a new website within three months, I didn't anticipate just how much we could achieve whilst navigating the complexities of our diverse audiences. The fact that we delivered on that ambition is testament to the platform's versatility and the expertise of the CultureSuite team. Being part of this community has also unlocked valuable new relationships across the sector."
Jay Walton, Director of Audiences, HOME
What's next
Because CultureSuite sites receive continuous updates rather than requiring costly rebuilds every few years, HOME's digital transformation is ongoing. The improvements above are a foundation, not a finish line.
Let's get this show on the road
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