Trafalgar Releasing

London, UK · 2018

Website redesign and frontend development for the leading entertainment business and theatre producer. A WordPress website like no other. Fit for heavy live traffic and frequent updates, our platform is ready to deliver thousands of new articles and news with little to no performance penalty.

01CONTEXT

Trafalgar Releasing in collaboration with its parent company, Trafalgar Entertainment, creates unparalleled opportunities for award-winning theatre productions, educational events, and live cinema screenings to be staged on a global scale, engaging and inspiring audiences worldwide.

The first time we discussed the future of the online platform, the company's site was hosted on a C# driven content management system, known as Umbraco.

Something was missing. A performant frontend must be accompanied by a backend that allows its users to perform as well.

There's not a day passing in the world without something exciting happening at the hand of London's Trafalgar team. Being a top global player, you need to expect a constant flow of news, blog articles, and event announcements. For your delight.

Content creation is a task that WordPress excels at. A powerful, yet familiar administrator interface along with an extensive plugin ecosystem that allows for rapid and reliant feature extensions was the main selling point in the team decision to migrate.

02ambition

You have to look good on stage. And being dressed well on the Internet means having a good-looking, apple of the eye, website that represents your brand and allows its visitors to have a good taste of your organizational culture and what you have to offer.

Not only is this the recommended approach for everyone with an online presence. But it becomes mandatory when you're taking the podium time after time. It becomes a responsibility in the face of your audience.

03Challenge

The main challenge was operating on a tight deadline. A mission-critical event was lining up. Trafalgar Releasing was expected to take the podium.

This meant that as soon as the name hit the screens, the audience will get their phones ready and hit the website on their mobile devices as soon as the presentation closed. A functional mobile experience was paramount for the success of the operation.

04Experience

The resulting website is a perfect example of mending usability with glam and a dash of British elegance to obtain a functional, yet very entertaining experience for the visitor.

The copytext on each page is carefully crafted to take the visitor through a complete awareness > interest > desire > action flow to help them cure information and follow the path with the highest return for them.

The page flow was also built by having a diverse audience in mind. It goes as far as brewing highly customized customer experiences for the most popular visitor typologies. Producers and cinema owners are provided with unique user journeys that serve them only the content they're most interested in.

Powerful imagery and creative video content together with carefully crafted copy are the main pillars of the trafalgar-releasing.com experience.

05brand

The elegant typography together with distinguished imagery that exudes sophistication, along with a fresh, modern color scheme, is meant to upscale the brand's image while maintaining its relatability.

06Technology

We were given full ownership over technology selection. And we are strongly opinionated when it comes to our technology.

07Front-end

The frontend is meant to be svelte in order to allow for fast download times, yet it needs to provide the development team with a logical, maintainable code architecture.

We decided that the available JavaScript frameworks at the time were coming with too much bloat to be reliable for our task. Happily for us, we were already deploying with success our own, minimal JavaScript framework, developed in-house.

08back-end

The backend is built on top of WordPress and provides the administrators with custom-tailored, ACF-powered content widgets meant to keep the content creators focused while providing enough flexibility in terms of the available content type to enable their creativity.

The platform takes advantage of Amazon's highly scalable, highly secure server infrastructure and Cloudflare's advanced caching strategies to present visitors with fast loading times and continuous uptime.

09mobile

We have maintained a mobile-first mindset throughout the process. We understand mobile and desktop experiences are two different complete scenarios and need to be treated accordingly aiming to always deliver the right content and avoid downgrading one in favor of the other.

10outcomes

An improved visitor to lead conversion rate. Increased number of blog readers. Increased newsletter subscriptions. Time for content publication reduced to only seconds from hours. Content delivered to customers faster and at reduced cost via mobile, tablet and desktop.