Engaging new website for a world-renowned
contemporary arts organisation

The project

Lancaster Arts is a world-renowned leader of cutting-edge contemporary arts.

Hotfoot is proud to have a long-standing partnership with Lancaster Arts. We’ve been helping with printed materials, such as seasonal event brochures, for many years.

The main driver for a new website was their outdated and difficult to maintain WordPress website. Particular concerns were its lack of SEO tools, lack of accessible features, and the need to have a deeper integration with a third party event booking platform. Hotfoot redesigned the website paying particular attention to the brand guidelines, accessibility requirements, and integration with a new booking platform. 

Strategy and planning

Hotfoot worked with the team at Lancaster Arts to design and launch a brilliant new website that encourages ideas, inspiration, creativity and a connection between those with a love for theatre and the arts. And provides an easy way to keep audiences engaged and informed with new shows, exhibitions and events.

We built the website with PatronBase arts management software integration. The website needed to provide an engaging yet simple user experience; telling the story of Lancaster Arts, what’s on, how to find them, and how to get involved. It needed to be clear to audiences when it came to enquiring about bookings, buying gift vouchers, and the various ways to support this fantastic organisation.

The website offers a simple user journey and highlights all the amazing things going on in Lancaster. There’s also a clear call to action to ‘sign up’ to their mailing list, keeping the community engaged and up-to-date with the latest exhibitions, shows, performances, concerts, and exciting goings-on.

The technical bit

The booking system used by Lancaster Arts is a third party system called Patronbase. As part of this project, we built an integration to this system to pull events and booking information down into the website. We also built a custom logging system that would highlight any issues with the import so the client would know to take action here rather than have it fail quietly as a background process.

The old website had an archive of prior events, blog posts, projects, collections pages and numerous information pages tucked away in there that had organically built up over ten years. Lancaster Arts wanted to transfer this valuable resource across to the new site – including the SEO link value of this content-rich, historical information.

To do this, we had to do a deep survey of the existing site’s information, the makeup of the HTML and existing functionality of the pages (as the site was built with WordPress using various plugins). We then built custom import/exporters to extract, clean and transfer across this content into the new website without losing anything that was built up previously and also kept a close eye on any URL changes in order to transfer the SEO rankings across to the new website.

Deliverables

• Consultation
• Strategy and planning
• Website/ UX Design
• Website Build
• Hosting