Recently, SmashingMagazine.com held a “Redesign the Web” poster contest with the aim of making the Web a more accessible and usable place. They received a number of great entries but three contributions really stood out that, when grouped together, sum up just about everything that is wrong with most arts organization web designs as well as pointing out the direction they should follow.
Web/Tech
Social Media Fail
In the rush to engage and reach out to new audiences, it can be all too easy to forget that one of the overriding goals is to get people to concerts; which means all of the followers, fans, likes and shares in the world aren’t worth much if they don’t help sell tickets. The last thing an arts group needs is to fall victim to the metrics syndrome where you spend more time compiling stats than tracking conversion and performance. And nothing drives this home quite as well as humor.
An App-Propriate Use Of Your Time?
Marc van Bree posted a superb article on 7/18/2012 over at Dutch Perspective titled Why performing arts organizations are not app-ropriate that is one of the best resources I’ve come across in recent months which arts organizations can take advantage of when determining whether or not their organization should consider developing an app. He starts off by referencing some recent and reliable mobile user statistics then moves into how and why all of this matters to arts orgs.
Twitter: The Concert Experience Force Multiplier
There’s a good article over at On An Overgrown Path that rails against arts organizations using Twitter in what might be best described as a myopic, self serving, unidirectional messaging system. The article served as a discussion point during last Sunday’s SoundNotion.tv program and after watching it, I thought it ended up being one of the most useful segments for the field as a whole a couple of good reasons.
What Everybody Ought to Know About Changes To SEO
A few months ago, Google implemented one of the largest changes in its history regarding how the search engine’s algorhythms index content. Code named Penguin, it ushered in a host of measures that penalize sites which violate their Webmaster Guidelines for proper (Search Engine Optimization) SEO techniques. What this means for orchestras is if your organization has ever employed the services of an old school, black-hat SEO quack, then your site is going to get penalized, and penalized hard, in search results.