Having been lucky enough to work on their new season brochure, this made it all the more exciting, carrying through our design on to the website.
As we did our research, looked at the strengths of The Everyman Palace we wanted to give them something quirky, fun and different. Our concept was to make the shows themselves the main focus of the website with a very simple navigation so you could flick through shows quickly, or if you wanted to purchase tickets this could be achieved within a few clicks. We took the styling from the current brochure and used it in such a way that the website could be easily changed to match the changing seasons.
Then, when we finished building the new site for the Everyman Palace Theatre, we could hardly have guessed that it would be under scrutiny across the globe, by high profile news sites.
During the production of Hamlet on Monday, an actor was struck on the face by a sword in a pivotal duel scene. Luckily the actor only suffered minor injuries and was discharged from hospital shortly afterwards.
While these were not ideal circumstances for the Everyman Palace to receive media attention, they are nonetheless of benefit to the theatre’s new website. While local and national newspapers picked up on it, and posted news articles, tweeted about it and blogged about it, the theatre is benefitting from added traffic to their site, as well as getting back links from reputable websites and blogs. They’ve received links from The Irish Times, RTE, The Telegraph, The New York Times, CBC News Australia, and Perez Hilton’s blog.
This will all, no doubt, help increase the search ranking for the site, as well as increase the exposure that the Everyman gets from this unfortunate accident. With the new site designed so that as many shows as possible are in the limelight, it will hopefully help to increase the likelihood of an increase in ticket sales.
As a result, the traffic to the site almost doubled (based on the short space of time we’d been tracking it). At the time of writing this, the Hamlet page on the new website, is the most popular page on the site!