Visitor attraction website and online shop for the Saint Patrick Centre
A WordPress website for the Saint Patrick Centre in Downpatrick, built to sell a day out and to get the gift shop earning online as well as at the till. The team already knew WordPress, so it stayed on WordPress.
The Saint Patrick Centre in numbers
The challenge: worth the trip
The Saint Patrick Centre in Downpatrick has an exhibition worth travelling for, and a website that was not persuading anybody to make the trip.
Visitor attractions live or die on whether somebody can picture the day out before they commit to it. They also wanted the gift shop earning online rather than only at the till, and the team knew WordPress and had no interest in learning something new.
An attraction is also competing with everything else somebody could do on a Saturday, not just with other exhibitions. The site had to make the day sound worth the drive against a beach, a cinema and staying at home.
The shop had a second problem. Most of what sells at the till sells because the customer has just walked through the exhibition, so selling the same things to somebody who has not been means the pages have to do the work the visit used to do.
Our approach: sell the day out
Visitor attractions live or die on whether somebody can picture the day before they commit to it.
So the exhibition and the experiences lead, shown through the centre’s own photography, alongside the practical detail people genuinely check: what there is to see, how long to allow, what it costs and what else is nearby.
The gift shop runs as a proper e-commerce build rather than a page of products, so it earns outside opening hours and reaches people who have never been through the exhibition.
It stayed on WordPress deliberately. The team already knew it, they had no appetite for learning something new, and the pages that sell a day out are the ones they need to be able to change fastest.
What we built for the Saint Patrick Centre
An attraction competing with everything else somebody could do that Saturday, so the site sells the day rather than the building.
Exhibition pages
What there is to see, shown through the centre’s own photography, so somebody can picture the visit before committing to the drive.
Experiences
The bespoke experiences sold as their own thing, which is the higher value booking and the harder one to explain.
Online gift shop
A proper e-commerce build, so the shop earns outside opening hours and reaches people who have not walked through the exhibition.
Practical detail
Prices, opening times, how long to allow and what else is nearby, answered on the page instead of over the phone.
Blog
A place for the centre to publish, which brings in people searching for something to do rather than for this attraction by name.
Stayed on WordPress
The platform the team already knew, so the pages that sell a day out are the ones they can change fastest.
The Tech-Spec
Built on WordPress, the platform the team already knew, so keeping the site current never has to come back to us. The exhibition, the experiences and the gift shop are all theirs to edit, and the pages that actually sell a day out are the ones they can change fastest.
HTML5, SCSS, CSS3, JS
Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Mailchimp
Services on this project
Most of our clients use more than one.
E-commerce
Shops for physical stock, digital products and gift cards, with payments taken securely and stock that stays in step with the shop floor.
→ 02Entry-level websites
A smaller, fixed-price start for a newer business that still has to be built properly, and can be grown into a full build later.
→ 03Maintenance
Updates, backups and security handled quietly in the background, so problems are dealt with before they become urgent.
→More work
A few of the other projects we have built.
