Walking into the website of a theatre, a festival, or a dance company should be a simple experience. I want to know what is on, when, where, how much it costs, and how to buy a ticket. In many cases, this information either does not exist, is buried three clicks deep, or is out of date. The site exists, but it does not work.
This is not a technical problem. It is a problem of perspective.
Most cultural organisations’ websites are built from the inside out. They reflect the internal structure of the organisation — its departments, its priorities, its language — rather than the journey of someone arriving from outside who knows nothing. The main menu has entries like “About Us”, “Mission”, “Team”, “Partners”. What the visitor is looking for, the next performance, the schedule, the price, is somewhere, but requires patience to find.
The first mistake is structural. A website is not an organisational chart. It is a service. And a service is organised around those who use it, not those who produce it.
The second mistake is language. Cultural organisations’ websites tend to use writing that serves the institution, formal, distant, full of references to the “artistic project” and the “cultural mission”, rather than writing that serves the audience. The difference between “a performance that explores the limits of contemporary scenic language” and “a play about what we cannot say” is not merely one of style. It is one of intention. The first sentence speaks inward. The second speaks outward.
The third mistake is imagery. It is common to find websites with low-resolution archive photographs, generic images of empty stages, or galleries that have not been updated since the last season. Photography is often the first argument a performance makes to someone who has not yet decided whether to go. Treating it as a decorative element is wasting the most immediate resource available.
The fourth mistake is the box office. In Portugal, there are still cultural organisations whose ticket-buying process requires the visitor to leave the site, create an account on an external platform, and navigate an interface that was not designed for that specific context. Every additional step between the decision to go and the confirmation of purchase is an opportunity to give up.
There is one mistake running through all of these that is the hardest to resolve because it is neither technical nor editorial, it is one of priority. Cultural organisations’ websites are frequently the last to be updated, the first to be cut from the budget, and the least discussed in management meetings. Treated as communication infrastructure rather than as a point of contact with the public, they end up reflecting exactly that status.
A website does not replace the experience of being in a room. But it is often what determines whether someone gets there at all. That responsibility deserved to be taken more seriously.
Photo: © Lee Campbell | Unsplash
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