Colmore BID
Creating a vibrant online experience that matches the district.
Colmore is Birmingham’s business district, 500 businesses, a full events programme, and a city app. Its website treated every part of it as a separate page. We rebuilt it as one connected platform in three months.
110,638
visits to Birmingham Light Festival 2026, up 76% year on year, the district’s biggest campaign, run through the new platform.
250
registered profiles in Colmore’s city app, from 344 downloads driven by the site.
3 months
workshop to live. Eleven templates, six content types.
The festival and app figures are Colmore’s own. The platform they ran on is ours.
Sector
Destination, business improvement district
Services
Strategy workshop · UX/UI · Web design & build · API integrations
Delivered
Workshop October 2025 · live January 2026
The problem
One district, six content types, and nothing talking to anything else.
Events, articles, businesses, projects, working groups and map locations are all connected in real life. Online they were built in isolation, as standalone pages with no relationship to each other.
So the site could never show the scale of what Colmore actually does. The events page did the work, 9,000 visits, while the publications page took 636 in a whole year, because nobody scrolled far enough to find it. Bounce sat at 51%.
And it was trying to serve two audiences through one structure: the businesses who fund the district, and the public who use it.
Typography
Penny Lane and Madison Antiqua give the district a voice with some personality in it. Roboto does the heavy lifting underneath, because an events listing has to be readable at arm’s length on a phone.
Colour palette
Nine colours, one for each area of the district, so the palette is doing the navigating rather than the decoration.
Brand guidelines by Common Curiosity. The structural use of them is ours.
Events
Traffic already said events were the reason people came. So events became the spine of the site rather than one section among many, and everything else hangs off them.
A brief for vibrancy. A problem of structure.
Two audiences, one district.
Birmingham Colmore speaks to the 500 businesses that fund the district and want to see what their levy pays for. Colmore Life speaks to the people who work, eat and spend time here. The old navigation ran both through one structure and served neither. We separated the journeys and kept the platform single, so one team maintains one site.
Colour that carries you through.
Working from the existing brand guidelines, colour became structural rather than decorative. Transitions between sections tell you which part of the district you’re in and pull you from one content area to the next. Expressive enough to feel like the place, ordered enough to find a Tuesday lunch spot.
One tagging system, six content types.
Every content type structured with the same tags, so relationships surface on their own. An event knows which businesses it involves. A project knows which working group owns it. Nothing is duplicated by hand, and projects finally became findable, which is what the levy payers had been asking for.
Then it went live.
App integration
Offers, discounts and vouchers stay in Colmore’s own app, where the team already manages them. The website pulls them in automatically. Rather than rebuilding it in WordPress and asking the team to maintain two versions, we connected the two.
Discovery and search
AI-powered search across everything: events, businesses, articles, projects. Ask for somewhere to eat near a venue and it works out the connection itself.
The proof
A district that finally looks like itself online.
The documented before, from their own analytics on the day of the workshop
Events landing page
9,000
News
3,000
What we do
1,500
Publications
636 in twelve months
Bounce rate
51%
Context, and it’s Colmore’s, not ours
Driving people into the city app was a goal set in the workshop, so the site carries app prompts across the events pages and listings. Colmore report 344 downloads and 250 completed registrations by April. Their app, their numbers. We built the route to it.
The platform then carried Birmingham Light Festival 2026: 110,638 visits, up 76% on the previous year. Colmore’s campaign, running on the platform we built.
Their success criteria, written on the day
“Easy structure in the back end. A clear home for content so it fits.” Met.
“Reduce the gap between project pages and events pages.” Met.
“Reducing bounce rate, from 51%, and higher dwell time.” Met.
“Conversion rate on events.” Met.
Traffic data confirmed the decision to lead with events was the right one.
“
What stood out most was their genuine care and attention to the project.
–Felicity Blades, Marketing Manager
Colmore BID
Services used
Four services, one project.
One day
Strategy workshop
Two audiences, six content types and a three-month deadline, mapped in a day.
Journeys
UX/UI design
Journeys designed around what people actually arrive looking for.
Eleven templates
Web design and build
Eleven templates on shared blocks, so the team runs it themselves.
Three systems
API integrations
BIDbase, Loqiva and Visit Birmingham, joined up behind the scenes.
Everything connected in real life, disconnected online?
When events, projects and people all live on separate pages, nobody sees the scale of what you actually do.
Talk to us about your content model →
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