The Challenge.
National Theatre Wales had an existing website that needed a complete refresh. We were tasked with bringing across a lot of their historical content, creating new designs whilst being considerate of the audience, creating a back-end that’s friendly for site admins and performing an integration with their ticketing system, Tessitura, in collaboration with Wales Millennium Centre (doesn’t sound like much, but the ticketing system is quite a beast).
What we did.
For this project we adopted a very collaborative approach with NTW, which was really important to help capture the needs of their audience. Together we created a focus group that would see us the whole way through the project, to constantly test our ideas, designs and ultimately the development. We thrashed out a strategy, working with the NTW board members and set about working on our main brief; creating a site that had a clear user journey whilst also allowing people to get lost in exploring the website’s content.
The end result is one we’re incredibly pleased with – a vibrant new website that shouts of the colour and character that NTW are all about. Expressing creative freedom was so important; the flexible and almost random nature of the design across all devices brings this to life.
And of course this wouldn’t be much of a case study without mentioning our first-of-its-kind integration between Tessitura and WordPress using the REST API. With so many options available within the Tessitura system we had a mammoth task ahead of us, but we cracked it. Something so deeply technical in the back-end runs a fairly simple checkout and user-management process on the front-end, allowing site users to pick their show, buy their seats, pay and receive their booking information all natively, without needing to direct a user out to a third-party site.
