A very Happy New Year to you all.

It hasn’t taken us long to get back to business as usual and I’ll be posting news of some client wins and website launches here soon. However, before we get carried away with all that, we should mention our recent move.

Just before Christmas, our London team moved into a new office. Our presence in London grew steadily throughout 2011 and a recent growth spurt has given us the opportunity to establish a full development team, led by our Technical Director, Mark James.

The new address is 359 Goswell Road, London EC1V 7JL. If you fancy coming to visit then just drop us a line. We’re right opposite Angel tube station, so we’re well sorted for transport connections. In fact, I’m told we’re just 2 hours 20 minutes from Paris. Now there’s a thought…

And so 2011 draws to close. We’re closing our doors today and will be back in full force with more devastating puns from Tuesday 3 January (with a skeleton crew in London from 28-30 December – they’re on 0207 060 6233).

This year has been by far our busiest. We’ve turned out some fantastic work for an ever-growing stable of excellent clients and picked up an award (and another nomination) in the process.

The company has grown, with some new hires and the acquisition of a brand new social media team. In fact, we grew so much that our London team have had to move to a new office (photos coming soon).

We’ll be starting 2012 as an award-winning agency working for clients on three continents. We’ve got big plans for 2012 but, in the meantime, thanks to everyone who’s been a part of Made’s 2011.

Around the office, we often say that they should be used as a case study for how to do this kind digital/marketing integration properly. However, the small team at Warwick Arts Centre spend more time promoting their venue and shows than talking at conferences, so we thought we’d take matters in our own hands and write something about them ourselves.

This post will briefly cover:

• Main website and content management system
• Mobile-friendly website
• Email marketing
• Venue screens
• Facebook integration
• Overall strategy

Introducing Warwick Arts Centre

First of all, for those that don’t know, Warwick Arts Centre is situated at the heart of the University of Warwick in Coventry and is one of the largest arts centres in the UK outside of London, with audiences that number 200,000+ a year. There are five performance venues –  a concert hall, theatre, two studio spaces, cinema and gallery with other creative spaces around the building.

With a programme that spans everything from a classical concert series, independent cinema, theatre, pop music and exhibitions, the Arts Centre’s digital content has to appeal to a diverse audience, 30% of whom are young people under the age of 26.

The main website

This is the foundation for everything that has followed, and a piece of work that we’re very proud of. The site is powered by Backstage, the CMS that we developed specifically to handle the demands of arts centres, especially ones that present a high volume of shows across a variety of venues. Clients always tell us how easy it is to use, but under the hood the programming architecture is correct, the code is clean and it’s SEO friendly too.

Backstage also powers all of the other features that we’ve built – either by serving the required information or by bringing additional functionality into the marketing team’s existing workflow.

Mobile site

We’d seen an increase in mobile traffic across many of our clients’ website and were aware that, good as the main website is, the mobile user was not being catered for adequately. The solution was to create a mobile-friendly version of the website that works across operating systems, with most traffic coming from iPhones, followed by Android and Blackberry devices.

The effect on mobile traffic was immediate and has been sustained. This graph shows visits in the months before and after the mobile site’s launch:

Impressive, right? We think it’s still one of the better mobile website implementations we’ve seen for an arts organisation, so we were really pleased with how well it went down at the recent Arts Marketing Association conference, where it was used as an example in at least two sessions.

Email marketing

We’ve integrated listings information from Backstage into a set of flexible email templates that make marketing emails visually rich and easier to pull together. A simple system pulls in images, associated information and links to tickets with campaign URLs so they can be properly tracked with Google Analytics.

Screens

Large screens all over Warwick Arts Centre’s foyers display information about current exhibitions, upcoming shows and special offers. In fact, the screens are very flexible – they’re also used to direct people to social media profiles (for instance, reminding people to follow Warwick Arts Centre on Twitter) and will eventually incorporate comments on social media accounts.

As with the emails, this information is pulled from Backstage. For instance, when a show is identified as ‘promoted’, a slide is pulled together from available information, images and video. That slide then goes into rotation on the venue’s screens – including in the cinema, where information is shown before screenings.

Facebook

Having got their own house in order with all of the above, attention has moved to social platforms, and Facebook in particular. On the Warwick Arts Centre Facebook Page itself:

• We recently launched a new What’s On tab which links through to the main site for ticket buying. It’s actually a modified version of the mobile site, allowing us to give even greater value for that earlier work
• We’re about to give the page an optional ‘Likegate’ or splash page for the site to coax visitors to Like the Page

We’ve done a lot more with Facebook on the main site recently too. When a member of the marketing team uploads information about a new event, they can choose to have a Facebook Event published automatically (saving the effort of doing this separately). We’ve not seen that done anywhere else.

We’ve integrated Facebook Connect, giving people information about their friends’ interactions with the site when they log in. They can also RSVP to Facebook events via the show information pages and see which of their friends are attending.

Strategy

We don’t just react to briefs that we’re given – we’ve developed a good, two-way dialogue with Warwick Arts Centre, scheduling regular strategy review meetings to keep up with what’s happening at the venues. That way, we can check that everything’s working as well as it should do, suggest solutions to any problems the marketing team might have and present any new ideas that we’ve come up with.

This has allowed us (meaning ourselves and the client) to build up all of the above functionality in a measured and strategic manner. And we’ve not stopped yet – this is a work in progress, with more features on the way as we start to look at functionality offered by location-based services and more.

Get in touch

We hope you found this case study interesting. If you’‘d like to talk about how we can work with you in a similar way then please just get in touch.

We’ve enjoyed a good relationship with the team at THSH for some time, having built (but not designed) the last version of their website. That was a few years ago now, and we all felt that the design and underlying code needed to be updated.

With full control over the design and build of the site we’ve been able to improve the interface, functionality and UI. The site, which integrates with the existing AudienceView ticketing service, also has more interactive features (such as commenting) and a refreshed design.

We’re really pleased with the new site. Have a look at thsh.co.uk

We’d also recommend you check out the film about THSH that Vermillion Films have put together, called Connecting People to Music:

It’s called The Stake and aims to get young people thinking about their finances. Not in a boring, traditional way though – it’s much more remarkable and ambitious than that.

The Stake is a unique competition that gives young people the chance to decide how £100,000 is spent AND allows them to turn a bright idea in to a reality.

The site went live a couple of weeks ago and there are now hundreds of great ideas backed by thousands of stakeholders. We’re looking forward to seeing who gets to turn their idea into reality.

We’d like to thank everybody who’s been involved – especially all the young people who have helped to test the site along the way.

Have a look at The Stake, earn some stakes, back some ideas and check out the trailer below:

We were responsible for the previous version of their site which, going by the number of others that were clearly influenced by it, set a strong standard for theatre websites. That was in 2008 and it was time for a refresh, so we’ve taken the opportunity to add some new functionality and tailor the site more closely to the client’s needs.

As explained on the Rep’s blog:

The new website features more content including blogs and videos, more opportunities for interactivity, it’s mobile friendly and we hope it will encourage site visitors to get involved with the organisation on all levels of engagement.

The biggest functional change is the new, responsive design. The site will recognise the size of the screen you’re using (whether it’s a mobile phone, the massive monitors our designers prefer or anything in between) and alter the layout of the site so you get the optimum experience.

There’s also improved information about cast and creatives, more prominent video, a better comments system and more information in the Get Involved section.

The site has social media integrated into it in various areas. For example, show pages and blog posts can be shared to Facebook and Twitter and comments can be left via social media channels. Most pages also have a Facebook-powered ‘Recommendations’ widget promoting popular content around the site.

Have a look at the site at birmingham-rep.co.uk.

The Sheffield Theatres complex is the largest theatre complex outside of London. The Crucible is the main producing venue in Sheffield, as well as the home of the World Snooker Championships, while The Lyceum, is the city’s main receiving venue, playing host to major musicals, drama, dance, comedy and children’s work.

For this website redesign, the client wanted to feature their shows in a more strongly visual style. We’ve allowed them to do that with large homepage banner images and rich media on the production pages.

Something that’s a little out of the ordinary, is the way the site covers more than just the three venues of the Sheffield Theatres complex. Thanks to the way the Sheffield Ticketing Network has been set up, it’s also possible to use the site to buy tickets for shows at other venues such as The Leadmill, Sheffield City Hall and Sheffield Arena.

The site also features Facebook integration, adding social functionality for logged in users, and a mobile-friendly version is on the way.

Carl Timms lead this redevelopment and, during the pitching process, was really keen to win the work. He wasn’t just a visitor to the venues while he was living and studying in Sheffield but also worked the bar there for 18 months. This was his triumphant return!

Check out the site at sheffieldtheatres.co.uk.

To explain the idea:

AngelShares is a new way in which you, as an individual, can help to fund exciting new arts and creative projects. It’s based on the concept of Crowdfunding, which uses online media and social networks to raise support for projects and ideas.

Importantly, Angel Shares is the only arts crowd-funding site that enables registered charities to reclaim Gift Aid on donations, adding an extra 25% to eligible gifts.

The process is simple:

• Browse through the projects and the benefits they offer
• Pick one (or more) that you like
• Register and add credits to your AngelShares account
• Allocate your AngelShares to the project(s) of your choice

As well as people donating to individual projects, we hope that people will come to use that site on a regular basis, supporting the arts by giving regularly and building a portfolio of projects

AngelShares was founded by Sarah Gee from Indigo Ltd. Sarah is an arts marketer and fundraiser with over 20 years of experience who’s already raised over £50million for arts projects. We know she has some ambitious plans for AngelShares and we’re looking forward to seeing the site take off.

It’s already off to a strong start, launching with projects from Belgrade Theatre, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Ikon Gallery, Light House Media Centre and Craftspace. Artists and arts organisations are now able to add their own projects, promote them via project updates and raise the funds they need.

You can also follow Angel Shares on Twitter and on Facebook.

We had some great news yesterday – Glyndebourne’s website has won a Lovie Award!

The Lovie Awards are overseen by the same organisation that runs the Webby Awards (the leading awards for our industry) and they’ve been set up specifically to recognise European excellence. This is their inaugural year.

Our award was in the Best Practices category which recognises websites that:

“serve as an industry benchmark for the most current, innovative, and advanced practices in web development. Sites demonstrating unparalleled excellence across The Academy’s six criteria: content, structure & navigation, visual design, interactivity, functionality, and overall experience.”

A couple of other things are especially pleasing about this win:

• The strength of the competition is impressive, featuring work by top ranked agencies and global brands. The other brands in our category were UEFA, the BBC, Philips, Skype and Vanity Fair.
• We get a statuette

We have to give a big thank you to everyone at Glyndebourne for letting us do some of our best work for them. Of course, on top of this win, the same website is still in the running for a BIMA Award.

In the meantime, we’re looking forward to that statuette arriving.

Front End Designer
12 Month Contract. Maternity Cover.

We’re delighted that one of our team will soon be hearing the patter of tiny feet. However, it also means that we’re looking for a Front End Designer to step in and fill her creative boots.

We’re offering the opportunity for a creative web designer to come on board and work for big name clients, designing websites that demonstrate an understanding of brand awareness and user experience with creative flair and technical implementation.

The role will entail:

• Creative concepts for pitches
• UX design: Wireframe and user interfaces
• Website page template design
• Identity and Brand development

Pixel pushing and vector tweaking are a given but animation and motion skills would be highly valued too. A working knowledge of current web production technologies:

• CSS 3
• HTML5
• JavaScript

…will put a smile on our faces.

Salary: based on candidates relevance, experience and ability to convince.

To apply:
You should send us a link to your online portfolio or examples of your work. Shortlisted candidates will be asked in for an interview. Please send a CV and online portfolio to work@mademedia.co.uk.

No agencies, thanks.