Discover how Greyhound Studio helped Elite Exhibitions consolidate the management of multiple sites under a single, customisable, and easy-to-manage bespoke WordPress theme.

Elite Exhibitions is a globally operating events company focusing on trade shows within the B2B space. They have built a reputation for high-quality exhibitions, particularly when it comes to design and innovation. Elite Exhibitions are especially well-known in the cruise ship and hospitality sectors, hosting annual flagship events such as the Cruise Ship Interiors Expo, the world’s only exhibition dedicated entirely to cruise interiors, across both sides of the Atlantic.

With their recent branding refresh, Elite Exhibitions took the opportunity to modernise and consolidate management of their multiple industry-relevant websites.

Relying on multiple websites but struggling to manage them with consistency? Reach out to the team at Greyhound Studio to find out how we can help you streamline your digital presence, making ongoing updates and management effortless—regardless of how many sites you manage.

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The problem

Operating globally in several vertical niches, Elite Exhibitions runs several unique domains. While each site had originally been built on a shared theme, they were set up as duplicates of each other, making it arduous to apply changes to all sites. Additionally, relying on an outdated editor led to poor visual consistency, unnecessary errors, and inefficient workflows.

A serious knock-on effect of running multiple cloned sites was that the front-end exhibitor displays ended up siloed within each theme. Despite having their data stored correctly, this complicated maintenance and updating each site for each event, resulting in an inconsistent interface and poor accessibility.

The solution

A custom WordPress theme built to scale with Elite Exhibitions’ needs

To unify Elite’s global brands, Greyhound Studio developed a bespoke Gutenberg-based theme — the built-in WordPress editor — using designs provided by their in-house designer. Key features and improvements over their existing cloned sites include:

Fully responsive page templates for mobile, tablet, and desktop.
Integrating Advanced Custom Fields’ Gutenberg integration to give Elite full flexibility to build beautiful, consistent, and on-brand pages using a simplified drag-and-drop interface.
Centralised control for instant updates, bug fixes, and functionality rollouts to all global domains.

Exhibitor management and widget integration

To help Elite Exhibition accurately display their global network of exhibitors, we created a centralised, API-driven exhibitor plugin.

Using headless WordPress CMS to provide an API with exhibitor information, we built a custom admin interface widget in Vue for managing titles, descriptions, media, tags, social links, and other relevant fields. In layman’s terms, we consolidated all their separate exhibitor databases onto a single centralised server and built a custom interface to manage it.

Key benefits of this build include:

Elite Exhibitions now relies on the same exhibitor API to power their mobile app during events.
Simplified central exhibitor data management, allowing Elite to assign exhibitors to multiple events with the relevant exhibitor data automatically updating on all relevant sites.
By delivering the exhibitor management tool as a plugin, we’ve made it compatible across multiple page builders, including Elementor.

70,000+ unique users served each year, with more than 2,500 global attendees per event

Powering multiple high-end international events annually with centralised exhibitor data

The results

This case study demonstrates how skilled and experienced web developers can help multi-site businesses achieve clarity, control, and scalability through intelligent web design.

Our new theme allows Elite to centrally manage and update multiple brand websites, cutting down on development time and inconsistencies.
The exhibitors widget has centralised a fragmented system, dramatically improving reliability and use experience.
While it wasn’t built with this in mind, using the standard WordPress REST API has made integration of exhibitor data with a mobile app trivial, which shows how well-chosen web solutions can open up new opportunities.

It’s not uncommon for businesses to run multiple websites. If, however, your team is manually adding updates, posts, promotions, or universal changes on a site-by-site basis, we can almost certainly help you develop a single, unified base of operations, giving you and your team the ability and confidence to quickly and effectively push changes, communicate with clients, and maintain consistency across all your digital platforms.

What Elite Exhibitions has to say about working with Greyhound Studio

As an events company, our websites are one of our most powerful tools for showcasing what we do, and thanks to Tom’s expertise, we’ve been able to do this seamlessly across a range of unique and diverse markets.

Over the course of our long-term partnership, we’ve rebranded several sites, launched entirely new websites, and even developed a custom-built membership platform. Each project was executed with precision and creativity.

Tom is outstanding at what he does. Our websites are consistently clean, responsive, visually striking, and perfectly aligned with our audience’s needs. Reliable, proactive, and an absolute pleasure to work with, Greyhound Studio has become an invaluable part of our extended team. We can’t recommend Tom highly enough!