Telling fantastic stories through dance, Northern Ballet is the UK’s leading narrative ballet company and a cultural institution, not just regionally, but nationally. And as an agency which relishes creating websites in the arts and culture sector, we loved this challenge. As it approaches its 50th anniversary, the north’s premier ballet company engaged Creode to design and build a new website to reflect changing artistic and commercial ambitions at the company.
The new site had to project Northern Ballet’s renewed focus on membership and donations, whilst presenting the company’s stunning work in a richer, more engaging way. A stiff but wonderfully enjoyable challenge for the Creode team.
If the site is much easier to use for brand owners, they will project the brand values, purpose and even the excitement of being there, because there will be a greater amount and more-frequently updated content that potential audiences can access.
Taking the lead from the insight above, our audience was not just potential and current customers of Northern Ballet, but a range of stakeholders and employees of the company itself.
The previous website was a burden for the internal team to manage, meaning content was not as readily updated as it could have been—which had the knock-on effect of not showing the company in its very best light.
It was time for some improvement and to ensure we continued that trend; not just a more streamlined system, but all the smaller touch points that contribute to a higher performing online platform.
After consulting with the business to understand the needs of various audiences, we wire-framed the proposed solution and built an interactive prototype to validate user journeys and interactions. This gave our client a clear, unambiguous direction of travel from the start, making decisions amongst stakeholders along the process, much easier, as they were based on set objectives.
From this point, Creode developed an ultra-bespoke system and easy-to-use, more intuitive admin experience to allow the team as much flexibility as possible.
The website now presents not only a highly creative new face for the company, but also simplified user journeys for visitors and a much more user-friendly management system. The new design system not only meets the requirements for today but has been created to allow for continuous scalability, diversity and improvement over time
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