Plymouth Arts Centre
This site is an excellent collaborative project between Plymouth Arts Centre, 'thirteen', the Bristol based graphic designers who came up with this remarkable design, and Ginzola, who have provided the highly specialised content management system.
This website features a highly automated approach to providing information on the Films, facilities and of course Art Exhibitions and Educational Events that happen in the centre.
The site allows staff to set dates for new items and upcoming ones, and the website automatically archives and displays the most appropriate films, events and art exhibitions. The result means that staff are able to manage the site themselves without spending too long on mundane tasks, improving the web experience greatly for the customer. Well worth a look.
Quote from Plymouth Arts
"Plymouth Arts Centre is a visual arts centre with a reputation for its local and international contemporary art exhibitions, independent cinema programme and thriving café bar. The historic building is close to the city centre and Barbican waterfront. We are an education charity funded by Arts Council England and Plymouth City Council.
Ginzola first visited us to audit our IT systems and talk to our management team about how to be more effective online. The solution that Ginzola came up with was a relaunch of our website with online ticket sales, plus a more effective social networking strategy.
We commissioned our brand designer, Danny Jenkins from Thirteen, to think about the functionality of the site and to take our brand forward online. Thirteen is a creative communications agency, based in Bristol. http://www.thirteen.co.uk
Next it was time to translate the visuals into a fully functioning website. My first priority was to appoint a web development agency that understood about the subtleties of design. My second priority was that they should be so fiendishly good and quick at programming that the job wouldn’t cost the earth!
Plymouth Arts Centre programmes a huge number of films, events, exhibitions and off-site projects. All of which need to appear in different sections of the website according to their dates. It was complex and would take me days of work to update our previous website every time the programme changed, plus constant maintenance. In my mind I thought up the perfect content management system (CMS), which would make the site a cinch to maintain. I’d input the films and events and they would automatically appear and disappear from the homepage and the correct sections, then go into the archive at the end. 2 weeks later Ginzola showed me the test site and a month later we went live. Ginzola spent time magically improving the search engine ranking for each page in the process.
Our stakeholders are delighted with the new site, which allows us to showcase the full breadth of what we offer. And for me, my new CMS is pure brilliance.”
Hanhah Prothero, Marketing and Communications Manager, Plymouth Arts