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Welcome to the Website Audit of Sooke Harbour Players, where I do a 6-point review focusing on visual design, information architecture, content, SEO, functionality and usability and how it all affects conversion.
Sooke Harbour Players describes their brand personality as enthusiastic community theatre and their conversion goals are: encouraging participation in theatre — whether it’s acting, directing or behind the scenes — and then of course promoting the shows and getting butts in seats, which means selling tickets.
They contacted me saying the existing website is “clunky, maybe outdated and not very easy to use.” From a technical standpoint, a quick look at the code tells me they’re on WordPress, which is an easy to use Content Management System — if it’s setup the right way. So I think this is more about the front end correlating to the back-end and using a theme with a more visual editor would be a good move here.
Visual Design
Starting with visual design, it’s important to match the website with the brand, so everything is consistent and presents a professional appearance, communicating that you’re serious about what you do. The first thing I notice is the brand colours in the logo are not carried through to any other element in the website — this blue text is a little bit off of the blue in the logo, so I would incorporate consistent brand colours throughout the website, especially for call-to-action buttons and navigation elements. Perhaps also using lighter and darker hues of the same or complementary colours to delineate content sections. I would also include elements in the footer to reinforce the brand to the end of each page.