INDUSTRY
Performing Arts
LOCATION
Minneapolis Minnesota
SERVICES PROVIDED
Website Redesign & Build
02 | THE STARTING POINT
ARENA DANCES has been making contemporary dance in Minneapolis since 1995. Thirty years of performances, festivals, school residencies, and touring across Minnesota.
Their website hadn't kept up with all the amazing work they have done across the years. Their old site was made through WordPress with a lot of pages that stopped almost before they began, built to hold information rather than to move anyone through it. For an organization with this much history, it wasn't doing the work.
03 | WHAT WAS GETTING IN THE WAY
The technical situation had to be untangled before design could start. The original domain had been registered thirty years prior by a third party who built the first site and never handed over the technical keys. Tracking down who controlled it took real effort, made harder because a domain we wanted had recently become available and we needed to move to it.
There was also the volume. Thirty years of programming, video, and photography, spread across enough pages that people struggled to find anything. Navigation was the central design problem: how to make that much content approachable without burying it.
04 | THE APPROACH
I worked as the designer, developer, and project manager on this one, keeping us on schedule while we went through decades of existing material and decided what to carry forward.
Navigation came first. With this many pages, the structure had to let someone find a performance date, a class, or the festival without hunting through a menu of tabs.
The site is video and photo heavy, which is right for a dance company and hard on load times. Compressing that material without losing the quality of the work was a significant piece of the build. Accessibility was a priority throughout, which felt fitting for a company whose stated mission is making dance accessible to all.
I also supported the integrations, including their Constant Contact email setup, and built a CMS for their archive so thirty years of work history was not lost.
The finished site runs to more than twenty pages. Three and a half months from start to launch.
05 | WHAT’S DIFFERENT NOW
ARENA has a site that matches the scale of what they've built. The domain is theirs, the archive is organized, and thirty years of work is navigable.
