Nestled in the heart of Venice, Florida, the Venice Symphony stands as a cultural cornerstone, enriching the community with its vibrant melodies and captivating performances. Since its inception, the symphony has been a beacon of artistic excellence, drawing audiences into a world of classical music. Led by passionate musicians and visionary conductors, the Venice Symphony orchestrates unforgettable experiences, blending skillful precision with emotive expression. The symphony’s commitment to musical innovation and community engagement has fostered a profound appreciation for the arts in Venice and beyond for more than 50 years.
Under the guidance of their new Digital Marketing Manager, Dania Hammad, The Venice Symphony reached out to SiteVivid to explore reimagining, redesigning, and refocusing their website.
Directives, Objectives, & Challenges
In addition to the conception, design, development, and implementation of a stylish, world-class, and mobile-ready website design, The Venice Symphony website had several other significant needs.
Photography
Unbeknownst to Dania Hammad at the time she reached out to us, SiteVivid’s own Max Kelly had been one of the go-to photographers for The Venice Symphony for years. As such, there was a satisfying continuity to this project.
One of the first actions we take after designing a site is to manifest the photographic assets we use to build the design. Drawing upon shots Max and others had taken in years past and a completely new photo shoot we shot from an event evening, we had a large repository of the highest quality imagery to use.
Ticket Sales
First and perhaps most important to the Symphony staff was fixing the disjointed flow of their online ticket sales process. The box office software that is used and the way it is coded makes it difficult to create a seamless and easy progression from viewing events to purchasing tickets. The prior website design did not accommodate this complexity resulting in a very confusing online event viewing and ticketing process.
Our research revealed that there were only a few ways to organically integrate the box office software with event management on the website. Following the general guidance of Occam’s Razor, we opted to follow the path that was simplest to create and implement, and the simplest for the staff to use. As such, we built two simple but custom pieces of software. The first was a plugin that would fetch the specified event information from the box office software. The second was a custom post type that would allow us to present the information in a consistent, pleasing, and organic manner.
Custom Musician’s Directory
Very important to the maestro Troy Quinn was to appropriately highlight the musicians of the symphony. With over 70 musicians that will sometimes rotate in and out, it can be tedious to maintain an accurate list of musicians that presents their name, image, instrument, and title, if any. Additionally, it is common for symphonies to have sponsors for musicians’ chairs which should also be presented. Trying to manually maintain all of this information without degrading the visual and style integrity of the webpage is typically impossible.
To keep everything easy to maintain and visually consistent, we created a basic, custom directory. This allows the Venice Symphony team to simply copy and paste information into a simple form for each musician. Once saved, the musician is automatically placed in their symphonic section and all appropriate information is displayed consistently.
Media Coverage
Symphonies like this one rely greatly on media coverage to get their brand and events out to the public. With 8 to 10 symphonic concerts per year and easily twice that in community events, this symphony is the subject of many articles in many publications each year: coverage that they definitely want to amplify.
To do this, they maintain a list of articles and features in publications on their website. This list contains the publication name, name of the article, a link to the article, and the date on which it was published. To make maintaining the information and visual integrity of the list easy, we programmed a simple article management system so all the team has to do is copy and paste the aforementioned information and our program lays it out.
Brand Integration
In addition to the custom web development, The Venice Symphony recognized that consistency between their website and print marketing would be very important for brand recognition. As such, they employed Max Kelly and SiteVivid to develop their 24/25 season program and other print collateral.
