Feeding a monster

The aim of our website project was to fully integrate all our social media, e-marketing and online sales for visitors. We ultimately want to grow our market and our audiences − increase online sales, website visitor numbers and, most importantly, user engagement. The new website has been purpose-designed to integrate with our ticketing system (PatronBase), is fully adaptive for mobile devices and, most important for us and our customers, it is bilingual.Aberystwyth Arts Centre, a department of Aberystwyth University, serves an important role in the Mid Wales region, attracting over 750,000 visitors a year. Operating on a year-round basis, we have a theatre, concert hall, cinema, performance studio, major art galleries, arts education spaces, a café, bars, bookshop and craft shop. We promote over 500 individual events, thousands of courses, a wide range of contemporary art exhibitions and 850 cinema screenings each year. As well as that, we also provide a comprehensive programme of festivals which draw in audiences from all over the world. Our big challenge was to reflect this wide-ranging activity online in a way that can be easily navigated by visitors (and staff!).

The new website has been purpose-designed to integrate with our ticketing system

Tincan worked with us throughout the whole process and across every element of the project − project management, consultation, site structure, wireframing, prototyping, building, testing and launching the new site. It was instrumental in helping to build a project plan from the ground up, maximising its potential and delivering on it. Its staff worked with our brand and design agency (View Creative) to ensure the new look and feel fitted in with the arts centre brand and both looked good and were effective across multiple devices.

The new site has helped us to take a big step forwards in strengthening our digital activity, providing a platform for future development and the ideal space for the new digital output we are generating and users are looking for. Being honest however, we do have the occasional concern that we have created a monster! The site has so much potential and is content-hungry. In order to maximise its benefits we need to commit significant time to feeding it and we are not using the content management system (CMS) to its full potential yet. This has been a massive project for us to deliver with a very small team, as the online work has to be juggled alongside all the other day-to-day marketing jobs. But although it has taken a little longer than planned, we are getting there, and the statistics show that user numbers are growing steadily. So we are on the right road…

Louise Amery is Deputy Director of Aberystwyth Arts Centre.

www.aberystwythartscentre.co.uk