Client
National Theatre Wales
Sectors
B2C
eCommerce
Our Services
National Theatre Wales had an existing website that needed a complete refresh.
Client
National Theatre Wales
Sectors
B2C
eCommerce
Our Services
We were tasked with bringing across a lot of their historical content, creating new designs whilst being considerate of the audience, creating a back-end that’s friendly for site admins and performing an integration with their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).
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.
An amazing feature of CSS3 has allowed us to be freer with our designs, which suits NTW down to a tee! The site is made up of these really cool floating elements that guide you off to different pieces of content, which re-organise themselves depending on the size of the screen you’re viewing on. We like to have fun with our development, in case you couldn’t tell.
Gareth Beedie“From the get-go the Illustrate Digital team impressed us with their cultural diversity and idea creation, bringing a great perspective to the process of creating a new website. From beginning to end of the project their communication was flawless, leading us on a great journey to the end result. We’re really happy with how the website looks and works, editing content is painless and various departments now have the freedom and simplicity to update their own sections which is a dream. These guys come highly recommended.”