Engagement Ongoing
Platform WordPress
Industry Maritime & Enterprise
Disciplines
Development Content UX
Development Partner

BELFAST HARBOUR

An ongoing development partnership for one of the UK's busiest ports — keeping high-traffic content like the cruise schedule and inner pages accurate, fast and easy to update.

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Overview

How do you keep an enterprise site moving as fast as the port it represents?

Belfast Harbour's website is the public face of one of the UK's busiest commercial and cruise ports. It serves a wide range of audiences — cruise passengers, commercial shipping, real estate tenants, regional press, and the public — each landing on different parts of the site for very different reasons.

I work with the team as an ongoing development partner, focused on keeping the high-traffic areas accurate and the content layer easy to maintain. The cruise schedule and the inner pages get the most attention: they change often, they need to be right, and they're seen by a lot of people.

The Brief
  • High-traffic enterprise site, multiple audiences
  • Cruise schedule that changes regularly
  • Inner pages needing structural improvements
  • Content has to be easy for the team to update
My Role
  • Ongoing development partner
  • Cruise schedule maintenance & improvements
  • Inner page rebuilds and refinements
  • CMS workflow and content tooling
Focus Areas
  • Cruise schedule accuracy & performance
  • Inner page content and templates
  • SEO & discoverability for key landing pages
  • Stability under traffic spikes
How It Runs

A Working
Partnership

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01
Audit

Mapped the live site against analytics and stakeholder priorities — which inner pages actually get traffic, where the cruise schedule sits in the user journey, and which areas were costing the team the most admin time.

A
02
Cruise Schedule

Refined the schedule into a structure the team can update confidently and visitors can scan quickly — clear arrivals and departures, sortable by date, and built so it stays performant during peak season traffic.

C
03
Inner Pages

Rebuilt and refined inner pages across the site — tightening templates, improving the content model, and giving the editorial team the components they need to publish without falling back on workarounds.

I
04
Maintenance

Day-to-day support: small fixes, content tweaks, performance and accessibility improvements, dependency updates. The boring, essential work that keeps an enterprise site healthy month after month.

M
05
Iterate

Each release is a chance to learn from how the site is actually being used. Quiet, continuous improvement — instead of one big redesign — keeps the experience sharp and the team in control.

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Step 1 / 5
The Work

Always
On.

A site that doesn't sit still. The cruise schedule stays accurate, the inner pages keep getting better, and the team has the tools to publish confidently. Quiet improvement, every release.

belfast-harbour.co.uk
Belfast Harbour website
01

Cruise
Schedule

A regularly-updated schedule of arrivals and departures, structured so the team can edit it confidently and visitors can scan it fast — built to stay performant during peak-season traffic spikes.

02

Inner
Pages

Ongoing rebuilds and refinements to the deeper pages of the site — better templates, tighter content models, and the components the editorial team needs to publish without compromise.

03

Quiet
Maintenance

The work that doesn't make headlines — small fixes, performance and accessibility improvements, dependency updates. Keeping a high-traffic enterprise site healthy month after month.

Reflections

What I
Learned.

Long engagements teach different lessons to greenfield builds. These are the ones I'd carry into the next ongoing partnership.

01
Maintenance is design work

Ongoing development isn't just keeping the lights on. The decisions made during small fixes — naming, structure, the shape of a content type — quietly compound into how easy the site is to run a year later.

02
Optimise for the editor, not the brief

The cruise schedule and inner pages get edited far more often than they get redesigned. Time spent making the editing experience calmer paid back faster than any front-end polish would have.

03
Small releases beat big rewrites

On a site this large, a steady cadence of focused improvements moves the experience further than a one-shot redesign — and keeps the team in control of priorities the whole way through.

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