The next performance, fixed at the top
Dates, running time, the cheapest ticket and a way to book. Most visits end here.
Theatre website design in Suffolk
A theatre is one building that becomes a different place four times a year. Almost every theatre website is one fixed look that pretends otherwise.
The visitor almost always arrives with a single question — when is the next one and can I get a seat — and the site has to answer it without losing the fact that a pantomime and a Beckett are not the same evening.
Built, and live
The Hythe Playhouse
A trust-run playhouse with touring drama, an amateur company and a pantomime that gets rewritten most nights it runs. The next performance is fixed to the top of the page with its dates, running time and cheapest ticket, because that is the only question most visitors arrive with.
The Hythe Playhouse is a fictional business in an invented Suffolk town, built to the same standard as paid work and deployed to its own address. It is set to noindex so it can never compete with a real theatre in search — everything indexable about it lives on this page instead.
The brief
What this website actually has to do
A seat plan that works on a phone
Two hundred seats on a four-inch screen is the hardest layout problem a small venue has, and pinch-to-zoom is not the answer.
One codebase, many identities
Four productions a year with nothing in common should not mean four microsites or one bland template.
Access told honestly
Twenty-two stairs and no lift is not something to hide behind “please contact us”. Say it, and say what you can do instead.
The build
How this one does it
- The site is a lighting board. Choose a production on the home page and the whole page is re-lit — colour, wash and the voice of the display type. One codebase, four identities, no reload.
- Each production page is dressed for itself. The show pages carry their own dress in the markup, so a link shared on social arrives already looking like that production.
- One tab stop per row, not two hundred. The seat plan is keyboard-navigable by arrow keys within a row. Two hundred tab stops is not a seat plan anybody could use.
What one costs
Website, built and handed over, from £300. A website designed, built and handed to you outright. You own the site and the hosting account, and there is nothing to keep paying me. Later changes are £49 an hour, only when you ask for them, and there is a monthly option at £89 if you need software as well as a site.
Quotes are fixed and in writing before anything starts, and I show you the finished site on a development link before asking for a penny.
Want this for your theatre?
Tell me what your business does and how people currently find you. I build it, show it to you finished, and hand you the accounts at the end — you own what you pay for.