Case study — our own
A single place
to find what matters
on the island.
ManxLife is the product we built for ourselves — a modern, editorial home for Isle of Man events, businesses and community life. Free for every organiser, fast enough to out-rank the Facebook-group scramble in search, and built mobile-first so it's as at home in your hand as on a desktop. We designed it, built it, and we run it.
The brief
Give the island one home.
On the Isle of Man, “what's on” lived in a scatter of Facebook groups — unsearchable, un-saveable, gone the moment you scrolled past. The official tourism site is static and government-run. There was no single, modern place to find island life.
We set out to build that place: a fast, editorial platform that gathers every event, venue and local business into one home — and keeps listings free for every organiser, from a village-hall jumble sale to an island-wide festival.
The wedge was search. Facebook Events has effectively no SEO; a structured, quick site could own “Isle of Man events” in Google outright. And the launch window picked itself — TT fortnight, the busiest, most-searched two weeks on the island's calendar.
Traa dy liooar.Manx — “time enough”. Built patiently, to last.
The approach
Four moves,
start to finish.
Strategy & positioning
Two-sided from day one: islanders and visitors on one side, organisers and businesses on the other. We planted the flag where the incumbent is weakest — structured, indexable pages that win local search — and made the model community-first: free to list, so supply arrives on its own. Then we aimed the launch at TT fortnight, when the whole island is looking.
An editorial design system
Not another admin-panel events app — a “living local magazine.”Dark-forward and warm, built on a proper design-token system — light and dark from day one, with automated accessibility contrast checks baked in so quality can't quietly erode. Fredoka for display, Inter for interface, Merriweather for editorial moments — and the Three Legs of Man as the mark.
The build
A modern web app built mobile-first— same editorial quality at the bus stop as at a desk, on any screen size. A live map with custom Isle-of-Man overlays — parish boundaries and the TT Mountain Course — so events land exactly where they happen. Behind it, an AI-assisted editorial pipeline gathers what's on from across the island, cleans it up, categorises and de-duplicates it, and queues it for one-tap human approval. Newsletters, community channels and an automated “what's on” video handle reach — all properly hardened, and covered by automated tests.
Ship it & run it
An automated release pipeline we built ourselves — one push and the site is live — with scheduled jobs, error monitoring and analytics wired from the first deploy. This is the Stabit model proven on ourselves: it's designed once, shipped properly, and kept alive. You own it. We run it.
A detail we love
The island, mapped properly.
Off-the-shelf maps don't know the Isle of Man. So we drew it in ourselves — the island's parish boundaries and the full TT Mountain Course — and layered them into the live map, exactly as they run.
Zoom out and events gather into tidy count-bubbles; zoom in and a food stall on the Mountain Mile or a session in a Ramsey square sits exactly where it belongs. Small thing. It's the difference between a map and our map.
Where it stands
Live, and filling up.
From a standing start, ManxLife is a real, populated platform the island is using — not a pitch deck. The numbers below are the platform's own live figures.
Live platform figures, mid-2026 — the platform's own counts, not audited metrics.
We didn't build ManxLife for a client. We built it for the island we live on — and to prove the whole idea on ourselves first. Island life is better when people are connected. Everything we'd do for you, we did for us: designed it, shipped it, and we keep it running.
— Stabit · Man-X Thats, Isle of Man
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