Supporting Crossrail as a digital partner for over a decade

Crossrail is the new high frequency, metro railway for London and the South East. From 2022 Crossrail trains will travel on the Elizabeth Line from Maidenhead and Heathrow in the west to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east, via new twin tunnels under central London.

Long term digital partner

We have been the digital partner for Crossrail since 2009 when we were awarded the contract after a competitive OJEU (Official Journal of the European Union) tender. We successfully renewed the contract in 2013 when the project went back out to public tender.

The initial project was to support Crossrail’s existing website and hosting platform, undertake maintenance work and work towards a full site redesign. We successfully managed Crossrail’s existing website and hosting platform for 18 months before the new site launched, we provided support to their team, managed the Rackspace hosting account, and added value to the site by increasing performance and adding functionality.

In 2010 we planned a complete redesign of the Crossrail website. The project took around six months to re-launch the site. Following this, we worked with Crossrail to enhance and add functionality to their website to help them effectively communicate the project and its benefits to a range of users and stakeholders.

Responsive redesign

As mobile traffic doubled year-on-year we undertook a responsive redesign of the entire site, which was launched in 2013, using agile project management techniques to help prioritise work. A further redesign of the homepage and other key areas of the site followed in 2016.

Evolution of the website on a solid CMS platform

Throughout this time the underlying CMS platform remained the same, even though we made major changes to the design and layout of the website.

In 2010 we developed a custom CMS based on the open source Zend Framework. We designed a system with a sophisticated content model, which enabled us to manage any type of content on the site. It also had good support for multimedia and geo-tagging content (which helped us build an interactive map).

The custom CMS approach is not one we tend to take these days instead we prefer to start with existing open source CMSs such WordPress or Craft. We now focus our efforts on adding value to existing, powerful CMS platforms.

Key project timeline

The need to constantly evolve and reflect the progress and stages of the infrastructure project was important to the success of the Crossrail website. An iterative design and development approach was essential in making this happen efficiently. Key project milestones included:

• June 2009 – Support and maintenance for existing CMS and hosting management transferred to Studio 24
• Feb 2010 – Near You interactive map launched alongside existing old site (tunnel boring machine locations, work site locations)
• July 2010 – Used Varnish Cache to improve performance and deal with high traffic spikes (reduced peak load time by 85%)
• Jan 2011 – Relaunched new, redesigned Crossrail website on new CMS platform
• Jan 2013 – Responsive redesign launched (27% of traffic was mobile)
• June & July 2013 – presented a talk with Crossrail at Marketing Week Live & Cambridge Digital Marketing Conference
• Dec 2013 – Multi-tier cloud hosting platform launched on Rackspace Cloud
• July 2015 – Redesign of Near You map (mobile-friendly, full-screen map, route map, journey planner)
• Feb 2016 – Major redesign on key pages (new homepage, station pages) to reflect the changing focus of Crossrail project (moved from construction & tunneling to stations & benefits for customers)
• Feb 2016 – Learning Legacy website launched to share good practice, lessons learned, and innovation from the Crossrail construction programme.
• May 2017 – Crossrail Archeology website launched
• Feb 2019 – we developed an online hub for Crossrail staff where they can share resources and collaborate.
• August 2020 – significant changes were made to comply with the U.K. public sector websites accessibility requirements
• Sept 2020 – we collaborated with Crossrail to present an industry webinar on the use of digital in stakeholder engagement