Our Work
Since 1997, Cool Blue has created more than 100 Web sites for companies representing a broad range of industries.
Alliance Theatre
Project: Website redesign
Services: Design, Development, Content management, Flash
Noted recipient of the 2007 Tony Award® for Outstanding Regional Theatre, the Alliance Theatre leads the nation in artistic achievement, education and new play development. Their vision and focus set the highest artistic standards, creating the powerful experience of shared theatre for a diverse audience.
Late in 2006, the Alliance Theatre engaged Cool Blue to help take their web site to a higher level. The two key directives of this project were to organize an extensive quantity of content into logical, and easy to find categories, and integrate a complex content management system allowing multiple users.
Cool Blue spent significant time in planning with Alliance staff crafting the user's experience through detailed information architecture and wire framing for all critical page layouts. Through learning about their perceptions and challenges Cool Blue was able to effectively create a new streamlined user experience that served all audiences while providing immediate and easy access for their audience to the areas focusing on new directives and outreach programs.
Design of the visual experience followed, and the site was then integrated with a content management solution provided by Ektron, Inc. and painstakingly implemented by Square Root Solutions. The Content Management System allows several Alliance staff content editors to flow in text and images while restricting them to the site style standards. The system administrator can then review content before it posts to the internet.
Upon launch - 3 days ahead of schedule - Cool Blue equipped the site with detailed tracking tools where the site successes and audience responses can be monitored for continual improvement.
Robert Saxon, Public Relations Manager for the Alliance, headed up the project and reports that both the internal and audience feedback has been outstanding. He told us he was very pleased with the CMS that allowed him to make new pages and create content very quickly, especially for the recent Tony Award. This was very important in that it allowed him to post content within the initial hours of the award's announcement and to direct press inquires to the site when he and his staff were slammed with press interest - the previous system did not allow him the same freedom and ease.
