At its best, theater is magical, and that feeling should be unmistakable from the moment a patron visits your website. Your particular brand – musicals, new works, or powerful dramas – should spring to life on the screen in a polished and enticing way. On the practical side, your website needs to be easy to use for yourself and your audience so that you can regularly upload fresh content, display show schedules and other events, and facilitate ticket sales.
Effective Theater Websites Are Engaging
Think of your theater’s website as one of your productions: it should be creative and distinctive and keep your audience coming back for more. Showcase images, videos, and audio clips from your productions—making it compelling and easy to buy tickets. Display the beautiful key art for all the productions. Keep the site refreshed to interest viewers and use it as a home for your marketing efforts, leading to a ticket purchase. Think about the theater lovers visiting your site and what would tempt them to learn more or come to experience a show.
Effective Theater Websites Are Easy to Navigate
You will have lots of content on your site. At any given point you may be promoting a show that is currently running while also promoting the next show in your season. You could be generating excitement and awareness of your entire season, acknowledging donors and sponsors and offering additional educational or community programming.
For aesthetic and practical reasons, this content needs to be well organized, clearly structured and easy to scan. Users should be able to intuitively find the show they want to see, buy tickets, register for a class, make a donation, or learn about subscription benefits.
Choose fonts and colors that are easy to read. Having clear calls to action throughout the website, such as “Buy Tickets Now” or “Sign Up for Our Newsletter,” will help visitors take the next step. Use headlines to break text into sections, and organize the information with clear menus and intuitive flow.
A Great Theater Website Facilitates Seamless Updates and Fresh Content
Since your content will be changed or updated frequently, your website should be built in such a way that makes it easy to do so. You’ll need to keep current with show schedules, special offers, classes and events, and you will want to be able to announce last-minute changes for inclement weather or cast replacements. You can also freshen the site with behind-the-scenes content, interviews with cast and crew, or recent reviews. A well-planned website can hide and archive content automatically for events that have passed, making website management significantly easier.
Effective Theater Websites Have Optimized Google Visibility and Good User Experience
Creating a website with good search engine optimization (SEO) simply means using techniques that make it easy for Google (and searchers) to find your site. This can include using relevant keywords (words someone uses when searching a show or your theater), creating quality content, and optimizing meta tags.
Good SEO also means paying attention to core web vitals, that is, how fast your pages load or how quickly the page responds when a user interacts with it. A good developer will help optimize your back-end code to improve the speed and performance of your website and make it a pleasant experience for your patrons.
Effective Theater Websites Speak to All of Your Audiences
The audience for your website includes more than theater-goers. Patrons, donors, sponsors, students and industry professionals will be visiting for information, and to be truly effective your site needs to make all of this content appealing and accessible.
You may have a newsletter, run promos, hold fundraising events, offer classes or conduct auditions for your season. There are many ways your website can support all of these as well.
- A custom interactive calendar showing classes for kids, teens, and adults as well as special summer programming classes
- A robust sponsorship acknowledgment system for the fundraising team
- Customized subscription package and membership sales process
- A simple form to sign up for the newsletter
- Forms for actors to upload resumes and submit audition materials
The Best Theater Websites Have a Landing Page for Each Production
An individual landing page for each show will create a straight path to quick and easy ticket sales. Each production’s landing page should be complete with show descriptions, photos or key art, a schedule of dates for the run, show times and a “Buy Tickets” button.
Online ads you run, links from your social media or QR codes from your printed materials should lead right to that page so that the potential ticket buyer doesn’t get delayed by stopping at the home page. Nearly all theater websites have an integration with a third-party ticketing platform to help you handle ticket sales more efficiently.
Effective Theater Websites are Optimized for Mobile Devices
Most likely you preface each performance with an announcement to silence or turn off phones. This is because your audience members are always on their phones, which is the exact reason your site needs to look and function perfectly on a mobile device. A viewer may see a clip from your show shared on social media and then navigate to your website to learn more. They could be discovering, investigating, and then purchasing a ticket to your show in minutes – all on their phones.
Make sure the site menu is easy to find and that every page, including show landing pages and your ticket purchase path is easy to view and use.
Effective Theater Websites Track Marketing Efforts
Understanding how a visitor arrived at your site (Google search, scanning QR code, Facebook post, clicking on a banner ad) can help you target and improve your marketing efforts going forward. Using Google Analytics 4 (GA4) will help you gather information about user behavior: what pages they visited, how long they stayed, etc. You can set up a GA4 account and monitor your traffic free of charge. Use this data to refine your marketing so your website expands and enhances all your marketing efforts.
A Theater Website That Gets a Rave Review
At Trillion, we have helped performing arts organizations of all sizes with website design and functionality with impressive results. Our creative team of designers and marketers understand the challenges of theaters and how to create a website that helps build their audience. If you’d like to see how your website could better serve your theater, we’d love to hear from you! Give us a call or contact us today.
