Court Theatre

Here’s how Mightybytes has helped this popular Chicago theater build community, create engagement, and drive significant increases in subscriptions and ticket sales since 2008.

Mightybytes first started working with Court Theatre, part of the University of Chicago, in 2008. In the years that followed, we have incorporated many new features such as a microsite builder, a production archive, and a new ticketing system to support the theater’s growth.

These projects help Court Theatre maintain an online experience that’s consistent with the high-quality of their productions.

After many years of adding site content, Court Theatre’s website became cluttered and undermined a good experience for users.

Symptoms included:

• Information was difficult to find, often buried several levels deep in a navigation that no longer suited user needs.
• An off-the-shelf, third-party ticketing system provided a slow and, at times, confusing ticket-buying experience.
• Also, the website’s university-mandated hosting system made the site slow and unresponsive.

Analytics data showed that these challenges caused user abandonment and loss of ticket sales. This drove the decision to undergo a site redesign, our second with Court Theatre.

This project, a more significant overhaul than previous efforts, included:

• User research: These efforts yielded important insights on ticket buying and donation habits.
• Product roadmapping: A collaborative discovery engagement helped stakeholders qualify and prioritize internal stakeholder needs, identify success criteria, and chart a course to achieving agreed upon goals.
• Data modeling: Taxonomy and content mapping improved information architecture and navigation, which helps users more easily find content.
• User experience: UI/UX front-end redesign and overhaul enabled an improved ticket buying experience and user journeys.
• Content migration: We audited and migrated content to a new custom-built WordPress CMS with many new features.
• Green hosting: We migrated the site to Mightybytes’ web hosting service, which is faster, more secure, and powered by renewable energy.
• Testing & debugging: A rigorous quality assurance process helped us ensure the site met Court Theatre’s business goals and its website users’ needs.

A critical component of this new project was to integrate and optimize their third-party ticketing system, specifically the user experience when purchasing tickets, subscriptions, or making donations.

By improving the ticket-buying experience, we were able to measurably improve the rate at which site users became customers.

Since launch, Mightybytes has worked with the team at Court Theatre to support the theater’s ongoing digital marketing strategies.

These efforts entail:

• Improving website functionality
• Custom analytics configuration
• Content and SEO analysis
• Funnel mapping to improve user experience

These efforts help the Court team stay focused on improving key digital metrics that drive organizational success over time. The theater website is also hosted and maintained using our basic maintenance service for improved performance and security.