Brief

Founded in 1992, the Ambassador Theatre Group is now the world’s number one live-theatre company with close to 50 venues in Britain, the United States and Australia. The group has an ambitious roadmap for standardising the way their venue websites are developed and rolled out on the Kentico EMS platform. With Kings Theatre being the first venue to be redeveloped under this new framework, it was key we were able to deliver against their objectives:

1. Provide a modern, contemporary and responsive design that faithfully reflected the stunning renovation of the venue itself without sacrificing on optimum user experience;
2. Devise a clear UX to deliver optimised user journeys for functions such as finding show information and booking tickets;
3. Develop a platform solution to meet required levels of site performance such as page speed and support high numbers of concurrent users and;
4. Successfully integrate with third party ticketing provider to ensure a seamless booking experience;
5. Deliver a flexible and extensible templated solution that could be adapted for future roll-outs across ATG’s stable of venues globally.

Solution

We translated the new brand identity into an elegnat, modern and repsonsive design, and delivered an intuitive and simple user experience with clear way-pointing to core functions such as show information, ticketing and where to visit locally before and after performances.

Central to the successful implementation was using Kentico's Portal Engine which gave us the ability to create the site with a quick speed-to-market and with easy content creation across the USA and the UK.

In total, the build took 4 weeks, followed by a further 2 weeks of client UAT, load testing and content population, which meant we delivered on time and on budget.

Impact

Since launch the site has been very positively received by the ATG teams in the USA and UK, plus it has been well received by the buying public. The branding is a great reflection of the newly restored venue, the new corporate ID for the theatre and a huge step forward from the previous website in terms of engagement and performance.

• Average visit duration has risen over 100% from 2m 37secs to 5m 55 seconds from December 2016 to November 2017
• Bounce rate has fallen from 69% to 27% over the same period
• Unique visitors have risen nearly 50% from 12.8k to 18k per month