http://hawkesbayoperahouse.co.nz/

From underperforming to star performance

The Hawke’s Bay Opera House website was underperforming – content was hard to find in Google, the website was tricky to administer, and the user experience was poor. The look was jaded and wasn’t true to the diversity and vibrancy of the performances and events that take place at the Opera House. Mogul’s brief was to revitalise the existing site to engage, inspire and entice current and prospective customers to attend a show or hire a venue.
To truly engage their audience, we felt the website had to achieve five key things:

  1. It needed to feature and showcase performances in an engaging and enticing way, and enable users to quickly and intuitively purchase tickets for shows.
  2. Event organisers needed to quickly and easily find the right venue option for their event and then be able to contact the Opera House with minimal fuss.
  3. With mobile usage sky-rocketing, the website needed to work perfectly on mobile and tablet devices.
  4. The team at Hawke’s Bay Opera House needed to easily and efficiently keep their website up-to-date with the latest news and upcoming events.
  5. People needed to be able to connect and engage more easily with Hawke’s Bay Opera House through social media.

With the new website we really wanted to capture the energy associated with performances and events; we also wanted to improve the user experience of the site to make it simple to navigate regardless of device.

Here are some of the features of the site that enabled us to achieve this:

1 Full screen photographic slider to promote events

The choice of imagery is crucial for this site. We provided guidance on the type and style of image to use to ensure that it fully captures the energy of the performances and events that take place. Most importantly, ticket purchases are now just a single click away!

slider

2 Venue hire enquiries can be made from the home page

Venue hire is at the heart of the Hawke’s Bay Opera House business strategy so it is really important that event organisers can access the information they need quickly and easily, and then email or pick up the phone to find out more. Users can now browse by event type, check out all venues or make an enquiry right from the homepage.

events

3 Show page promotes all upcoming shows

The show page elegantly displays all upcoming shows – it is simple to navigate and book tickets; it also looks great on a mobile phone.

shows

4 A dedicated venue page searchable by event type or venue space

A large slider promotes each of the venues. Visitors can either look for a specific venue space they have in mind or find recommended venue spaces suitable for a particular event. Either way, venues are easy to find and book.

venue

5 Extensive social media and contact info so users can connect easily

Hawke’s Bay Opera House can now connect effectively with their audience through social media and a monthly email newsletter – communication designed to improve engagement and promote upcoming events.

social

The team at Hawke’s Bay Opera House were really happy with the result:

“Working with the Mogul team has been a simple, easy and incredibly efficient process. From the outset they took the time and gave the personal commitment to get to understand us as an entity and business. With their knowledge and expertise they not only designed a great website (that has resulted in very positive feedback from stakeholders and users), they also helped train us to be self-sufficient in updating it to suit our ever-changing needs! The end result is a very fit-for-purpose website that reflects the energy, vibrancy and passion of the Hawke’s Bay Opera House – thanks Mogul.”

Christine Spring, CEO

“I feel the knowledge and expertise of your whole team has been the most valuable to us, you obviously researched our business, the types of people who would be visiting our site, the different aspects to our business, and how we operate as a business, you put yourself in our clients shoes as well as listening to and understanding our vision for both the new website and our whole business approach before coming forward with your ideas and look for our new site.”

Rosie Anstis, Corporate Events Co-ordinator