Theatre Royal Windsor
Website and Spektrix box office integration
We completely redesigned the Theatre Royal Windsor website from scratch in mid 2109. This was our second theatre website, having produced our first for the Towngate Theatre, Basildon a year earlier. We designed an attractive front end, intuitive listings and a clear booking process that saw the site take £1M in the first three months of operation.
Spektrix API + the DOT WordPress plugin = integration joy
The new WordPress site is linked to ticketing and venue management system Spektrix through a mix of API calls (for our custom PHP/HML elements like the events calendar, home page slider and what’s on listings) and carefully styled iframes for the Spektrix seat selection and booking sequence.
We linked WordPress and Spektrix through our own custom WordPress Spektrix plugin, which allows nuggets of data pulled from Spektrix to be used throughout the site using simple shortcodes.
Our work included a comprehensive redesign of the look and feel. With receiving theatres (those that don’t produce their own shows) it’s a challenge to work with the hugely variable images provided by touring shows.
Look and feel is at the mercy of show images
Many send just a single poster image complete with type which often clashes with the design of the site, and gets badly cropped in sliders, for instance.
Our design guidance for the in-house team suggests they use production shots free of type for promotion in sliders and in listings, leaving poster images on the show pages.
