The New Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra Website Hits a High Note
02.22.24
St. Louis is extremely musically inclined. From the Muny singing its way through the summer to the song “Meet me in St. Louis,” our city has played and hosted many crescendos in music. And, one organization has been here through it all: the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.
The Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra has shined brightly in the St. Louis community for almost 150 years. Considering their wealth of history and experience, Paradigm was excited to improve their website design, functionality and content strategy.
Setting the Stage for Something New
In early 2022, the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra announced the renovation of Powell Hall. It sparked ideas among their marketing department to reconsider their website goals. When the SLSO team came to us, they wanted a website redesign that would resonate with everyone — from families and annual subscribers to new visitors and generations of donors.
“In the early stages of the website project, we knew that one of the biggest impacts we could make to both SEO and user experience was an updated site navigation and architecture,” our SEO Strategist Hannah said. “As a well-established website housing years’ worth of rich content, there was ant opportunity to reorganize the site’s numerous pages and better leverage their value.”
After evaluating every page on the SLSO’s domain, we built a new website architecture and an updated navigation with a mega menu. The utilization of a mega menu nestled content beneath relevant parent pages. For example, “Plan Your Visit” features child pages such as finding venues, enhancing experiences and more prior to attending performances.
This allowed us to monitor content, keyword optimizations and technical considerations – setting the foundation for future pages on the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra website.
Composing Critical Content for the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra Website
The Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra website redesign unified a fresh site architecture with a strategic content and keyword plan. The large volume of content led our copywriting team to work closely with the SLSO, ensuring the continuation and revision of key content.
“The SLSO’s new architecture required the creation of new pages and combined content from existing pages,” Senior Copywriter Mary said. “Before writing, we had to ensure the voice of the SLSO was consistent across all pages. We worked directly with their team to develop content to appeal to all and drive conversions.”
The new content brought a fresh look to their home page and unified all pages under the same tune. Additionally, we were able to clearly communicate to visitors that the SLSO is still actively conducting its concerts outside of Powell Hall. Our team crafted curated venue pages detailing this season’s concert locations while the renovations progressed.
Drumming Out the Design Details
In the thick of a redesign and renovation project for Powell Hall, Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra wanted the website design to flow with the changes. Our design team streamlined their user journey, wove in dynamic elements and created a “stand out look” that showed its evolution.
“One of the most unique aspects of the site design was the UX of the site architecture itself,” Creative Director Katie said. “ This site had over 100 pages that were relevant to various audience members at different points in their journeys. The challenge for us was how to create a hierarchical navigation system that was concise enough for new visitors to find what they were looking for, but not so concise that it alienated return users who use the site repeatedly for one or two actions.”
We first turned our focus to the home page — incorporating the branded gradient into headers, the navigation bar and additional headers. From there, the rest of the website design took shape across interior child and grandchild pages, housing both SLSO content and outside sources cohesively. For example, the Watch and Listen page effortlessly merges embedded video links from their YouTube channel onto their site.
The design of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra website reflects their transitional phase, while adding excitement with vibrant pops of color and striking photography.
Working Behind the Curtain
Our web developers managed a variety of tasks, including data management, API integrations and mobile compatibility. One of their greatest challenges of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra’s website lied in the events and ticketing integration.
“Integrating their events and ticketing API into the new website was a fun challenge,” Web Developer Shane said. “It was tricky to fetch the data and utilize it in a meaningful format. This included date codes and getting a direct link for the customer to purchase a ticket. Additionally, for the events spanning multiple days, we worked to get the events ‘grouped’ together and show a date span. This was a new challenge that kept our attention.”
In addition to API integrations, our developers incorporated custom design elements into their content management system (CMS). This allow the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra team to quickly update content, create new pages for future programming and share the latest events in their calendar.
Explore the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra
As the SLSO inches closer to the Powell Hall reopening, the new website launches them into a new era. We are proud to play a part in the next phase of their history.
For more website projects, visit our work page to discover our latest websites and other digital projects.
