New York City Children’s Theater » Website
Goal: Redesign the NYCCT website for a visually appealing, easy-to-use experience across platforms, that drives donations while saving time and money
New York City Children’s Theater is the premier theater company educating and entertaining kids and adults throughout the New York metro area. Although they had a functioning website, it was lacking several key elements: notably, it was not responsive, it was difficult to update (requiring developers to make many seemingly minor changes) and, visually, it did not accurately represent the caliber of this dynamic, creative organization.
Speed of Like was brought on to create a new website that would not only address the issues of the current site, but one that could evolve and grow with the organization. As a non-profit, NYCCT’s budgets are always stretched in creative ways to have the greatest impact, so a site that they could update internally and didn’t have to worry about replacing in the next few years was an important factor.
Achieving New York City Children’s Theater’s Goals
Website aspects focused on in the development of the new website include:
Visuals
Working within their established branding and color schemes, we developed a custom look and feel, with large, interactive homepage visuals and dynamic elements throughout the site that enhanced their identity as NYC’s preeminent children’s theater company.
Photography was selected from their various shows and programs and formatted to fit into various pages on the site.
Branding and Keywording
NYCCT had recently invested in a new logo which worked well for most marketing materials, but was not ideally suited for a website or page header. Speed of Like created new layout variations of the logo in a header-friendly format, saving time and not requiring engaging their graphic designer.
All page titles were optimized for NYCCT’s target audiences and keywords.
New York City Children’s Theater original logo didn’t work well for a website menu bar
New York City Children’s Theater logo re-laid out for banners and headings
Donation System Reconceptualization
New York City Children’s Theater is a well-known nonprofit with a lot of supporters. Their previous donation system was a donate-what-you-want structure without a clear story. Speed of Like created a new donation page that:
Quickly explains the importance and impact of NYCCT’s programs
Offers clear levels of support with descriptions of what those donations will do for the children of New York
Calls to Action
Clear calls to action were added to every page to drive
- Ticket sales
- Donations
- Newsletter signups
- Collaboration inquiries
Standard Speed of Like Web Design Elements and Services Included
These services are provided at no extra cost with a new Speed of Like website, unless otherwise requested by a client:
- Search engine optimized (SEO) titles, headings, and descriptions
- Social media “share” and “follow” integration tailored to channels of choice
- Customized social media preview images on applicable pages and posts
- Theme customized to aesthetic and functional needs of client
- Responsive design, tested to work natively across multiple platforms and browser sizes
- Easy-to-update newsroom featuring press releases, testimonials, and feature articles
- Email list platform integration
- Calls to action from appropriate pages to drive appointment requests and email sign-ups
- Contact form(s) customized to the needs of the company
- Google Analytics and Webmaster tools integration for SEO and performance monitoring
- Sitemaps created and submitted to Google for crawling and better indexing
- 30-day support and functionality guarantee
Original Content Created
Here are some of the pages, graphic and text elements created for NYCCT’s new website:
