A rockin’ new website that’s easy to update.
The Kalamazoo State Theatre is a buzzing historic theatre in downtown Kalamazoo, MI. They host dozens of events throughout the year, including concerts, movies, shows, and private parties. They needed a website that moves as fast as they do.
The State Theatre’s management approached 11Web simply asking for help managing their existing WordPress website. But after some probing questions and discussion, we discovered that their 5-year-old site had become clunky. It was hard to use for both the site visitor and for their office staff to update.
Together, we defined some key project goals for a website redesign.
Key Project Goals:
- Make it much easier for the user to buy tickets for events, in far fewer clicks
- Create an opportunity for local businesses to advertise where to stay, shop, and eat
- Drive more revenue through private event rentals
- Bring more attention to the venue’s history and unique atmosphere
- Make the website, events, and hours easier to update
Work Completed
Modern Design
11Web designer Kristin created a vibrant, energetic new design for the website. This is a far cry from the old burgundy website design that didn’t use their real logo or match their branding.
The new design incorporates midnight blue and bright blue with accents of gold and gray. The theatre’s beautiful photos are used throughout and unified with blue gradient overlays.
Custom Copywriting
We suggested new text on several of the pages and did the writing for them.
The new About page focuses in on why a visitor would want to choose the State Theatre for a concert.
The Wedding Venue page is a new page that we suggested to drive traffic just for wedding rentals. We wrote the copy to be search engine optimized, and it now ranks on page 1 of Google for the search “Kalamazoo Wedding Venue.”
Key Features of this Theatre Website Design
- Easy-to-update home page with simple fields to fill in for photo slider and text
- New layout for the Shows & Tickets page, with buttons to buy tickets immediately
- Unique photos in the header and footer of every page, selected by 11Web
- Updated History page with additional information and new photo gallery
- Search engine optimized Event Rental and Wedding Venue pages
- Contact form that routes to different departments depending on inquiry subject
Launched November 2017
Don’t miss our other Kalamazoo website design work!