Hubbard Street Dance had an outdated website that presented many challenges for the company and the patrons it serves. Site visitors struggled to buy tickets, register for classes, and rent studio space due to poor site navigation. Furthermore, the site was not responsive and left content editors unable to produce and share content via the website. Adage redesigned a mobile-friendly site that represents the caliber of Hubbard’s contemporary performances and allows patrons to quickly find and complete purchases on any device. Umbraco was the perfect choice, providing the Hubbard Team with an easy-to-edit CMS that worked within their tight budget and timeline, resulting in increased ticket sales and class registrations.
Skills used
- Design
- Digital Strategy
- eCommerce
- Integrations
- Mobile
Sector
- Arts & culture
Partner doing the case
- Company:Adage Technologies
- Website: adagetech.com
- Type: Gold Partner
A solution with fantastic after-launch joys 📈
How it all began
Hubbard Street Dance is an American dance company that performs in downtown Chicago at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance and at the Edlis Neeson Theater at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Hubbard Street also tours nationally and internationally throughout the year.
The design, look and feel of their old site were not representative of Hubbard, and site visitors struggled to buy tickets, register for classes, and rent studio space due to poor site navigation. Internally, the content management system (CMS) was challenging to update and edit and required long lead times from developers for even simple changes. The site was not responsive and left content editors and marketers unable to produce and share content via the website.
Adage launched a website that presents Hubbard Street Dance as a leader in the arts, a groundbreaking creator of must-see contemporary dance and the go-to resource for dance education.
Umbraco saves the day
Umbraco was chosen for Hubbard as a budget-friendly, easy-to-use, and fast-to-market solution. An Adage-led discovery process, including workshops and interviews, helped prioritize content and provide information to create an intuitive architecture for the new site.
Now, Hubbard Street boasts a modern navigation and design elements that provide a fluid, interactive and fun user experience. The new Hubbard Street site delivers a dynamic, energetic, accessible, and welcoming feeling. Adage designers utilized Hubbard Street’s already beautiful branding to emphasize the company’s history while paving the way for the future.
The site is now representative of the level of sophistication and quality of the productions Hubbard Street puts on stage. Their dated 3rd party ecommerce solution was replaced with the official Tessitura (Hubbard Street Dance’s ticketing provider) ecommerce platform, TNEW, for single ticket purchases, donations, and subscriptions. Class registration and studio rental transactions remained with a separate purchase path, but the new website provided a streamlined way for users to find the classes and rental options they needed.
How we made it happen
A Uskinned template allowed Adage to hit the ground running with the Hubbard redesign. Styling and functionality customizations on the front-end, and 3rd party integrations with Tessitura’s data and the TNEW platform, allowed the site to accurately reflect Hubbard’s brand and provide patrons with a frictionless user experience.
Umbraco allowed Adage to easily create customized pages and components like the home page banner that features Hubbard’s rich content. Adage was able to create custom performance detail pages in Umbraco that integrate seamlessly with Tessitura’s APIs to display upcoming performances and links to buy tickets via TNEW.
The integration decreases human error, as Hubbard staff can update performance information in one place, which is automatically pulled onto the Umbraco pages. The integration with TNEW is brought into the main navigation, which shows the user’s current logged-in status.
Further, the integration with TNEW, and application of consistent styling throughout the site and purchase path, provides patrons with a unified experience. A user can add performances to their cart, then continue browsing without losing the session or detecting a change in the browsing experience.
On the technical side, the Hubbard Street Dance site was built on Umbraco version 7. The Uskinned template provided an excellent starting place complete with styled, functional page and component templates. Adage’s front-end customizations were built using the pre-processor Sass for the CSS styles, and Typescript for the Javascript. Their build processes were set up with Webpack for compilation, continuous integration with Teamcity, and Octopus for deployments.
The results 🚀
Choosing Umbraco for Hubbard promoted flexibility, scalability and allowed Adage developers to build and launch quickly. Umbraco is also easy to learn and easy to use. Simple content changes and text edits requiring a 24-72-hour turnaround time now take minutes.
Hubbard saves $15K in internal and external development hours originally budgeted for issues that are nonexistent with the new site. Ticket sales and registrations have increased overall, and we’re seeing significantly more users completing their purchases online, with sales by phone decreasing by 60% as the new purchase path proves intuitive and customer-friendly.
The reorganized navigation encourages patrons to support Hubbard Street through subscriptions and donations, and inspires visitors to dance through class registrations. The site redesign excites patrons to see Hubbard Street performances and provides inspiring, valuable content for everyone from dance lovers, parents of interested dance students, and casual fans alike.
Hubbard Street realized a 100% increase in page visits per session leading to continued growth through informing, inspiring, and ultimately converting through ticket sales, class registrations, or studio rentals.
