Popping-in?

Our studio is filled with light and music.
There are multiple meeting rooms, a well stocked kitchen, and an indoor garden (with fishpond). Talk to us about access needs, environmental factors and any accommodations we might make to enhance your visit. Pop-in for tea and stay to use a spare desk for as long as you need.

11 Greenwich Centre Business Park,
53 Norman Road, Greenwich
London SE10 9QF

Cog is a Certified B Corporation

Public transport

We’re next to Greenwich train and DLR station. We have a door right on the concourse but it’s different to our postal address.
what3words.com/hungry.means.author

From Greenwich rail platform

This video shows the route to take from the train that will arrive at Greenwich rail station from London Bridge. There's a gentle slope next to the staircase.

From Greenwich DLR station

This video shows the route to take from the DLR that will arrive at Greenwich DLR station from Bank. There's a lift at the platform level if that's useful.

By car

If you have to come by car, we have a couple of parking spaces. We have a charging point that you are welcome to use if you have an electric car. Call ahead and we'll make sure the spaces are free. Use our postcode (SE10 9QF) to guide you in.

Get in touch

We’d love to hear from you. Use whichever medium works best for you.

11 Greenwich Centre Business Park,
53 Norman Road, Greenwich
London SE10 9QF

Cog is a Certified B Corporation

New project enquiry

It's exciting to chat about potential new projects. We don't have a ‘sales’ team or a form to fill in. Call us or give us a little detail via email and we'll get straight back to you.

enquiry@cogdesign.com

Website support

If you're a client then you'll be best served by calling us or contacting us via ClickUp, otherwise you can use this dedicated email that reaches all of the digital team.

digital@cogdesign.com

Finance questions

This email hits the inboxes of the people who deal with our bookkeeping and finances.

accounts@cogdesign.com

Just want a chat?

Sometimes enquiries don't fall neatly under a heading, do they?

hello@cogdesign.com

Cultural Calendar

A round-up of recommendations and reviews, sent on the first Friday of each month, topped-off with a commissioned image from a talented new illustrator. Sign-up and tell your friends.

Sign me up Cultural Calendar

Cog News

An irregular update of activity from our studio. Showing off about great new projects, announcements, job opportunities, that sort of thing. Sign-up and tell your friends.

Sign me up Cog News
Theatre Hullabaloo

Theatre with children at the heart

Theatre Hullabaloo website

Website

An interactive website for a pioneering new theatre that puts children at the heart of everything they do.

Theatre Hullabaloo has been a successful touring company, creating engaging and accessible work for young children. They also produce TakeOff, an annual regional festival of theatre for young people (and a bi-annual convention for international practitioners in that area).

When they approached us they were about to move into a permanent new home, a purpose built venue next to the Hippodrome in Darlington.

Before we could start on design we needed to know how users engaged with their current site. Analytics showed that over half of the visitors to the homepage left the site without exploring any further and that ‘what’s on’ and show pages accounted for 50% of page views. One of Theatre Hullabaloo’s most exciting projects, TakeOff Festival, had only 4% referral traffic from the Theatre Hullabaloo site.

But we didn’t want to rely solely on data and analytics – we wanted to get the Hullabaloo team’s unique perspective on their audience. We headed up to visit the team. With their venue still being built we met in the charming Quaker hall.

After an insightful workshop we focused attention on a few key personas and worked up user journeys to examine why, how and when they visited the site. We realised that the website needed to focus on specific areas…

  • Accessibility was key – many of the visitors would have special needs requirements (and the venue was designed specifically for those). For instance, for visitors on the autistic spectrum we knew we wanted to include video introductions. This would allow attendees to get used to the unfamiliar environment they were visiting. We also wanted to make finding an accessible show as simple as possible by creating a visual filter on the shows page.

  • We wanted a way to bring the TakeOff festival to the fore but, as it was an annual event, we needed to make sure this didn’t sit idle for most of the year and take up space on the site when it wasn’t needed. So we built a specific section that sits behind a discrete tab when the festival isn’t on.
  • The site needed to be engaging. To do this we added video/animation that features children of all ages. And, an extra layers of engagement throughout is a modular feature, allowing Hullabaloo to add actor and staff profiles, audience and press quotes, video content and galleries.

  • To counter the high bounce rate we wanted to immediately communicate what Theatre Hullabaloo stood for as well as making shows accessible immediately from the home page. We decided that the best way to do this was to produce an animation in-house that acted as Theatre Hullabaloo’s online manifesto.

We commissioned the fantastic family photographer Andrea Whelan to take some shots for use in the animation as well as across the site and in promotional material (in a somewhat raucous but productive day of shooting in the Cog office).

We built the still images into a story-book style video, and added animated type to bring the messages to life.

The final piece of the jigsaw was ticketing. Hullabaloo share a ticketing facility with the Hippodrome. So we worked with them and their suppliers, Spektrix, to integrate a bespoke online purchase pathway, plus all of the email marketing and other digital messaging.

Content Management System: WordPress
Integrations: Spektrix CRM
Launched: December 2017
www.theatrehullabaloo.org.uk