Corn Exchange Newbury

Name: Kindera
Price range: $

The Corn Exchange Newbury is a precious jewel in the centre of Newbury and a diamond of a client, with whom we have been working for nearly two decades.

Project type: Website
Client since: 2006
Role: Web design & development
Learn more: Visit website

The brief

Having worked alongside the Corn Exchange Newbury for nearly two decades, we have relished partnering with such an ambitious client. This long-standing relationship has produced multiple iterations of their websites over the years, culminating in the latest platform launched in 2024 — purpose-built to enhance the user journey and deliver higher standards of accessibility.

The client

The Corn Exchange Trust manages four key spaces dedicated to arts and culture. Its flagship venue, the Corn Exchange, features a 400-seat auditorium, a 40-seat independent cinema, and a vibrant Café and Bar. For outdoor work, 101 Outdoor Arts serves as the National Centre for Arts in Public Space, offering dedicated rehearsal, creation, and accommodation facilities for large-scale performances. Community engagement thrives at the centrally located Old Library through a wide range of courses and workshops for all ages, while The Base Greenham provides a dedicated visual arts gallery, workshop space, and studios for eight resident artists.

Website

Overall, the Corn Exchange Newbury website is exactly what you expect from a venue website promoting events: it offers users different ways to explore and book events. However, there is so much more that goes on in the background to make this happen — especially for a multi-venue organisation like the Corn Exchange Newbury.

Spektrix

One of the major integrations we built was a way for the data the Corn Exchange Newbury team adds to Spektrix (their box office platform) to be automatically imported into Craft (their Content Management System). We created a custom plugin that uses the Spektrix API and imports the event data on a regular basis. This saves the team hours of work as they would otherwise have to duplicate their efforts.

Once the data is imported, the client team can then add rich data to the event and, more importantly, we can create a better experience for the users. Searchable and filterable events, events calendar, related events, promoted events etc.

Design

The previous Corn Exchange Newbury leaned heavily towards the red colour from their defined colour palette. For this iteration the brief asked for more variety, whilst sticking to the brand colours. Importantly, the use of colour had to be carefully considered to avoid them clashing with the colours from the promotional event images.

Corn Exchange Newbury event listings page with multiple events, above which is are filtering options.

Corn Exchange Newbury home page with multiple content sections

Customise your experience

Another great way we can use this data is to add a nice personalisation feature, where users can select which genres they are interested in and the website adapts to display relevant information on the home and event listing pages. If you are into Cinema and Dance, then the website shows you events related to your interest – great for the user and great for the client with increased ticket sales.

Corn Exchange Newbury event page for The Comedy Network event showing a modal overlay with the performance dates, show times and red booking button.

Booking tickets

We also created a truly flexible way to display show time and booking information for events. With such a vast catalogue of shows that run on single date/time or multiple dates we wanted to design a user interface that worked for both instances. The overlay menu offers this flexibility, which is fantastic for the Christmas Pantomime with a ridiculous number of performances.