I recently completed a long-term project for the Purple Rose Theatre Company’s web site. The task was to redesign their home page with a fresh CSS layout and more varied content while keeping ongoing maintenance overhead low.
The various bits of content for the new home page are easily updated by the theatre’s own staff with assets and content that they already have on hand. This material is “optimized for web usage” from content that is generated as a part of the routine marketing activities of a nonprofit professional theatre, including their e-newsletters, press releases and playbills. This maximizes the value that the organization can achieve through their small staff’s marketing efforts. At the same time, we have created small online archives (of a sort) as a means of sharing the organizational history with patrons who may never be able to grace the theatre’s art deco lobby in person.
The new home page also provides excellent fodder for search engine indexing, placing good hand-crafted textual content much higher in the page code by using CSS for layout, so the spiders won’t run out of steam before the getting through all the formatting code. Yet another bonus was the elimination of a “News” page that got very little traffic in the first place, and therefore didn’t make a very effective place to put important news of upcoming events. That wasn’t the only aspect of revising the site’s information architecture that was informed by web analytics data; I also took dominant navigation patterns into consideration.
When they land on the home page of the theatre web site, most visitors just want to know what’s showing right now and what’s coming up next, and two links account for the vast majority of the traffic through the home page. If we assume that most average visits will contain just these three pages - Home, Now Showing, and Our Season - and this assumption is borne out by the stats, then these three pages are the most important parts of the site in terms of creating opportunities to further engage visitors.
Over the last few years, the Now Showing and Our Season pages have been developed as strategically as possible, but there was a moratorium on changes to the home page because it featured a welcome message from Jeff Daniels, the theatre’s founder and executive director (NOT owner!) I pitched wireframes and talked SEO strategy until the powers that be were convinced, and the go-ahead was given to redesign the home page. Now that the changes are made, I’m confident that the Purple Rose will see results in terms of increased visitor engagement by several measures.