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St Paul’s Cathedral is a place of worship, a historic landmark and a destination for visitors from around the world. Its website needs to welcome people with different interests, from attending a service or booking sightseeing tickets to exploring history, music and educational resources.
Following an open tender, Big Blue Door began work in June 2021 and launched the new Drupal 9 website in March 2022. The engagement included discovery, user research, information architecture, design, development and ongoing hosting and support.
The partnership later expanded to implementing the new identity created by Pentagram. Big Blue Door led the website design and technical implementation, with the refreshed Drupal site going live on 9 March 2026. Further work extended the identity to the Cathedral’s separate Shopify ecommerce platform.
Business case and background
The previous website did not adequately reflect the breadth of the Cathedral’s work. Its dated technology and lack of responsive design made it particularly unsuitable for an audience increasingly using mobile devices. Content could be buried seven or eight navigation levels deep, making important information difficult to find.
The replacement needed to support practical tasks while communicating the Cathedral’s wider significance. Visitors wanted to understand what they could experience before committing to a visit, including events, opening times, accessibility and the building’s layout. Other audiences needed resources they could use without being physically present, or to continue learning afterwards.
Big Blue Door worked with the Cathedral’s team to turn these needs into a more coherent digital experience. The subsequent rebrand introduced a further requirement: to translate a new visual identity into a functioning website while retaining the value of the established Drupal platform.
Pentagram created the brand identity, working with Simple Revolution on strategy and verbal identity. Big Blue Door’s role was to interpret and implement that direction digitally, working closely with St Paul’s and reviewing concepts with Pentagram. This distinction is central to the partnership: brand creation and website implementation were complementary contributions.
About the project
Researching the complete visitor experience
Big Blue Door began with stakeholder workshops, interviews, analytics and behavioural research, including Hotjar analysis. The work identified mobile use as a priority and confirmed the importance of ticket booking and visitor information alongside interest in the Cathedral’s history.
Research informed nine audience personas and journeys covering worship, visits, events, resources, shopping and donations. Big Blue Door and the Cathedral team developed a clearer information architecture, then explored three initial creative concepts through Figma prototypes. Workshops and remote Userbrain testing helped refine the designs before development.
Building a useful digital destination
The Drupal website brought together practical planning and deeper exploration. A daily “What’s On” facility helped visitors understand the Cathedral’s changing programme. The interactive map introduced the Cathedral floor, Crypt and Dome, while the timeline opened up its history. A learning library provided access to films, podcasts and written resources.
Big Blue Door delivered the original build through agile working and fortnightly sprints, involving design, frontend and backend development, and testing. The website launched at the end of March 2022. Ongoing support included Drupal maintenance and AWS hosting, with autoscaling infrastructure in London designed to accommodate busier periods.
Bringing Pentagram’s identity into Drupal
The 2026 work built on this foundation. A joint kickoff with St Paul’s and Pentagram in November 2025 established the brand direction and Big Blue Door’s responsibility for website concepts. A subsequent review examined the existing components, editorial needs and visitor journeys.
Big Blue Door translated the identity’s typography, colour and layout principles into a digital design system. Concepts were reviewed with the Cathedral and Pentagram before progressing into detailed component design and implementation. Work covered major page types, navigation and search, the footer, event and resource presentation, and distinctive features such as the map and timeline.
Weekly check-ins and a separate preview environment supported delivery. Components passed through Big Blue Door’s QA process before Cathedral staff reviewed them with real content. The new brand went live on 9 March 2026, followed by further refinements through the continuing support relationship.
Extending the brand to Shopify
Big Blue Door subsequently updated the Cathedral’s Shopify shop to reflect the new identity. Although the initial assessment explored built-in theme controls, delivery records confirm custom theme work was used. This included standardising banner presentation and providing separate mobile and desktop imagery treatments. The retail platform remained Shopify, with a visual relationship to the Drupal website.
Outcomes
The original launch delivered a responsive platform that combined visitor planning with worship, heritage and learning. Big Blue Door’s continuing involvement enabled the platform to evolve through design, implementation and ongoing support, extending the useful life of the original investment.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal suited the Cathedral’s combination of structured information, rich editorial content and interactive visitor features. The platform needed to handle events and schedules alongside learning resources, historical material and practical information, with clear routes between them.
Big Blue Door recommended Drupal 9 in its original proposal. Its open-source model supported flexibility in future development and support, while its publishing capabilities provided a foundation for managing varied content within one website. The delivered solution combined this with Apache Solr search, an events calendar, an interactive timeline and a visual guide to the Cathedral’s different levels.
The technical assessment considered coupled, decoupled and headless approaches, with a coupled Drupal implementation recommended as the best fit for the requirements at that stage. The emphasis was on giving the Cathedral a manageable publishing platform with enough flexibility to deliver its particular visitor journeys.
The later rebrand demonstrates the continuing value of that choice. St Paul’s retained Drupal, and Big Blue Door developed a new visual system across the existing content types and reusable components. The website could adopt a substantially different identity while preserving its role as the Cathedral’s main content platform.
Shopify continued to serve the separate retail operation. Big Blue Door’s work brought its presentation into line with the Cathedral’s new brand; it was a related ecommerce workstream, not a Drupal Commerce implementation.
Technical Specifications
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