Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
Old habits die hard; even the ones that deserve a swift death. Case in point, it never ceases amaze how many performing arts organizations still have an audio file set to autoplay when users visit the website’s homepage. For the most part, the online community crossed the autoplay=bad threshold back in 2011 and although most performing arts groups seem to have caught up to what everyone else realized a few years …
Recently, Twitter released the latest update to its API (application programming interface) and completely cleared out support for the previous version. An API is a programming language that allows two different applications to interface with each other, such as displaying a list of your Tweets at a website. Since then, what was once a simple process is now a royal pain in the neck. For example, in order to display a …
Last week’s post about the uproar surrounding pianist Krystian Zimerman’s decision to cut a recital short because he spotted a patron allegedly recording the performance with a Smartphone generated some terrific feedback from readers. In particular, readers focused on issues surrounding copyright infringement and patron interaction. First up, was a comment from reader Rochelle Skolnick who observed that the coverage surrounding the topic was missing copyright related points. I admit that …
The Annual Orchestra Website Review examines more than 80 professional orchestras in the United States and Canada and rank them by a detailed series of quantitative criteria but due to Orchestra Crisis 2012/13 (details here) we had to postpone and scale back the reviews. As it turns out, the delay was fortuitous in that it set the stage for ideal timing to focus the review efforts exclusively on what is easily one of …
In advance of the responsive orchestra website review later this week, it makes sense to provide a working example of not only what responsive design is, but why it is a necessary component for contemporary performing arts org web design. In order to get a really good idea of just how effective responsive web design is at producing both desktop and mobile versions of a website via single source contact, take …