Key takeaways
- Seamless Integration: Understand the impact of integrating with Tessitura’s TNEW purchase path, ensuring a seamless flow of data and automation of ticketing and event management.
- Dynamic and Flexible Design: Appreciate the flexibility of Peppered’s customisable building blocks, allowing The Joyce team to create engaging layouts and manage their website content more efficiently
- Future-Proof Technology: Discover how the SaaS model of Peppered ensures The Joyce Theater’s website remains up-to-date with regular updates, new features, and security enhancements
- Holistic Digital Platform: Understand how the holistic integration of the website and ticketing system streamlines operations, automates processes, and optimises sales.
Venues rely on their websites to act as an extension of the immersive experience patrons encounter within their physical spaces. From the moment visitors step through the doors, they need to easily navigate to performances or find amenities. A well-crafted website must reflect this customer experience as it’s paramount for optimising ticket sales and fostering engagement.
At After Digital – our research-led team of digital designers and strategists – we specialise in crafting bespoke websites for arts venues, addressing their unique challenges and aspirations. Recently, we had the privilege of collaborating with The Joyce Theater, a beacon of dance excellence in the heart of New York City.
Introducing The Joyce Theater
Nestled in the vibrant Chelsea neighbourhood, The Joyce Theater exudes an aura of artistic vibrancy with its iconic neon-lit facade and commitment to showcasing dance performances year-round.
It is the home for dance both in New York City and nationally, providing a space for more than 400 domestic and international companies. An annual 45- to 48-week season attracts more than 150,000 audience members every year to experience diverse performances.
However, behind its dazzling exterior lay digital challenges that necessitated a transformative approach.
What challenges were The Joyce Theater facing?
Tasked with rejuvenating The Joyce's online platform, our team embarked on a journey to align its digital identity with its esteemed reputation. Outdated technology, cumbersome navigation, and an unfriendly mobile design were just a few hurdles hindering its online presence. Not only did this cause security risks, but working on the site was becoming increasingly labourious for the team, especially as the amount of content on the site grew.
But perhaps the most urgent challenge was the need to restructure the content on The Joyce’s website. Some key areas, such as donations and venue information were particularly hard to find for users. This can lead to frustration and may even force users to go elsewhere to get performing arts tickets.
After speaking to key stakeholders and gathering information during the discovery phase, we determined the goals of this project:
- Build a new Joyce Theater website using the Peppered platform that integrates with Tessitura’s TNEW purchase path.
- Make the website fully responsive and mobile-ready.
- Restructure and modernise website content to create a more fluid and interactive user experience, and make it easier for visitors to find information.
- Give The Joyce Theater team more control and flexibility when it comes to editing pages, layouts and content so that patrons can engage with and learn more about performances through video, photos, podcasts, and social media content on each performance page.
- Make content available to people of all abilities, with special consideration for the blind and visually impaired.
- Refresh the look and feel of the website while remaining true to the brand.
How did we tackle these issues?
Many of the goals are realised with the employment of Peppered as the website technology that powers The Joyce Theater’s website – a dynamic website platform tailored for arts and culture venues that seamlessly integrates ticketing and event management tools, which are essential to venues.
For The Joyce, this means integrating with Tessitura, enabling data to flow seamlessly from Tessitura to Peppered. This empowers The Joyce marketing team to work more effectively using automation tools – processes that were previously administered manually such as updating ticket availability were now completely automated, which reduced the need for reactive changes.
Tessitura is one of the leading ticketing, fundraising and customer relationship management (CRM) systems for arts and culture venues. This is why CultureSuite ensures Peppered’s connection with Tessitura is stable and is able to make full use of the data and features available.
To help accommodate the rich library of content on The Joyce Theater’s website, Peppered is built using flexible building blocks. These are fully customisable, mobile-ready and can even be scheduled. This allowed the team to work more proactively and set website changes to go live outside office hours.
With these building blocks, and many others from the Peppered ‘Parts’ library, The Joyce team can now create dynamic and varied layouts that reflect their stylish branding. All blocks and elements of Peppered websites comply with WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards to ensure everyone can enjoy all parts of The Joyce website.
These are just a few features of many on the Peppered platform that make website management easier for venues. The best thing is, all of this is available right out of the box and the platform is future-proofed due to the SaaS model it operates on.
The annual fee for Peppered not only makes investment in a new website tech stack smoother, but it ensures The Joyce doesn’t ever run into the issue of having outdated technology powering their website. Every three weeks, the CultureSuite team introduces new features, bug fixes, security enhancements and general upgrades so that Peppered websites are always at the forefront of digital excellence with the most up-to-date technology.
So that’s the technology taken care of thanks to Peppered. But what about the information architecture? That requires a human touch. The team from After Digital – made up of people from UI design, product and customer success – was sent to New York to conduct a series of meticulous discovery sessions, analytics reviews, surveys and UX tree testing.
Through this, we were able to determine how people moved through the old Joyce website, what information they wanted to look for and how UX could be optimised to create a better experience for visitors.
We found that key areas such as donation pages and venue information were popular but hard to get to. By restructuring the site’s content, we could make these pages more visible and easier to navigate. Reducing browsing friction give visitors a more positive experience of The Joyce brand while also helping them to find relevant tickets more easily and therefore optimise sales.
Lastly, we meticulously fine-tuned the website visuals, implementing new colour schemes and revamped typography to impart a refreshed, contemporary vibe while upholding brand guidelines. Notably, we ensured seamless visual integration between the website and TNEW, enhancing the continuity of the brand experience as visitors transitioned from browsing to the purchase path. This relationship with TNEW allows Peppered websites that need to be integrated with Tessitura systems to get up and running quickly without any loss of control or ability to customise the overall look and feel.
The result?
By implementing all of these techniques and technology, The Joyce Theater has a website befitting of its brand, performance program and passion for dance.
With the Peppered platform, The Joyce no longer has to worry about their website feeling obsolete. New features are always being suggested by our community of venues so they’ll be able to access great ideas suggested by other venues.
Along with integration with Tessitura, The Joyce Theater has a holistic digital platform where the website and ticketing system can seamlessly share data and automate a wide range of processes to make website management easier and quicker.
Peppered’s flexible building blocks are also giving the team many more tools to create new pages and layouts which is enhancing the way they display the engaging content they produce. Along with the refreshed website visuals, it’s fair to say that The Joyce Theater’s website captivates visitors in the same way their building exterior does now.
Next steps
No matter what stage you're at in your search for the perfect web platform or digital marketing tool for your venue, we'll help you get the information you need to make the right decision.
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