We’ve just completed the design and development of a website for the Citizen’s Theatre in Glasgow.
As one of Glasgow’s oldest theatrical institutions, the Citizen’s Theatre has been at the cultural heart of the city and wider Scottish arts scene for over 70 years. This year, the Citizen’s Theatre or Citz, as it is affectionately known is launching a redevelopment programme that will seek to help cement the theatre’s place as a cultural centre for years to come.
As part of the plans for the Citz, the marketing team wanted to modernise the website while retaining archived listings going back almost ten years.
This presented significant challenges as the content architecture had been patched and modified over the last 9 years resulting in an overly complex codebase. The site redesign involved updating the frontend for responsive design, modifying the content entry interface and logically reworking the CMS to simplify content management.
Beneath the surface, the main focus was increasing the ease of use for Citz staff, reducing the amount of duplicate content entry and automating as much of the workflow as possible to streamline content entry and management.
As Expression Engine was the CMS of choice we were able to achieve much of the required streamlining using native functionality, thus future-proofing the content as much as possible.
The theatre has a huge stock of production photography and the new site allows the excellent images to take centre stage, while retaining the simple black and white aesthetic that was inherited from the previous site design.
The website is heavily optimised to allow it to handle the high volume of daily traffic.
The Citizen’s Theatre is currently running it’s critically-acclaimed adaptation of the cult Irvine Welsh novel, Trainspotting.