Produce a sophisticated Content Management System to allow Castle Howard to manage individual pages, display beautiful banner images, showcase upcoming events and tell the story of the vast history of the Castle Howard estate.
Create a user portal that can facilitate the purchasing of tickets to events and allow users to sign up as members ('friends') to Castle Howard, receiving discounted entry to the House & Grounds.
Implement an extensive .NET Core Web API to handle delivery of the correct data from the 'back office' to multiple front-ends, including the website.
Create a 'back office' application to interface with Castle Howard's existing management systems, including events & ticketing, membership management, custom-built reports tailored exactly to Castle Howard's requirements and more.
A Unique Opportunity
Castle Howard are one of HCI's longest-standing customers, having been making use of our Content Management System for well over a decade. Over time, as the scale of their business requirements have grown, HCI have been on-hand to help formulate and deliver the exact solutions required for a business as vibrant and well-regarded within the local area.
HCI produced a suite of applications for the Castle Howard team to be able to make use of on a daily basis, and have continued to work closely with them to help improve their internal processes wherever possible. A breakdown of the work includes:
Content Management System
- Making use of the HCI Content Management System suite of built-in features, Castle Howard are able to edit text, images, SEO & Meta tags, page navigation and page visibility all within the click of a few buttons.
- An extensive set of user management tools, allowing their Administrators and Site Managers to handle the scope of what their content editors can and can't do effectively.
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Control more complex bits of content from an Admin Area, such as Page Highlights, News Articles, Job Vacancies and more.
Back Office & Web API
- HCI produced a .NET Core-based application that Castle Howard can use to easily manage various aspects of their business, most importantly the handling of Events and Tickets.
- An interface was built to sync changes from their existing EPOS system at regular intervals, to ensure that all changes that are made at the source are quickly reflected in our system.
- Significant effort was made to ensure that the Back Office can correctly handle how the data of tickets purchased through the front end are processed and dealt with correctly.
- The .NET Core Web API application allows us to pass data to multiple front ends, including the CMS website and also the Event & Membership portal.
Event & Membership Portal
- HCI built a portal that users can access to purchase tickets and memberships for their upcoming visits. We wrote this as a Single Page Application (SPA), using Vue as the framework of choice.
- The application is split into 2 major areas, Events and Memberships. From within Events, users can select different ticket types, choose sessions from a calendar-based date picker, assign individual details to a ticket, apply discounts and more. The membership portal authenticates users via the Back Office, and once logged in allows them to manage all aspects of the membership, including editing details, viewing loyalty points totals, access support from the Castle Howard membership team and viewing upcoming booked event details.