Keeping Your Website in Sight


by William McEvoy

What makes a well-constructed website for a troupe or show? Why do some groups find their sites provide great support for their shows, while others get little or no results?

As the listings editor of Improv Review, I spend a lot of time looking at troupes' sites. As the webmaster here, I spent a lot of time last year helping to oversee our site's redesign. I've seen some great sites, I've seen some god-awful sites, and I want to use this article to share with you some of my insights into website design and functionality. I am coming from the viewpoint of a business person and a web user, not as a graphic designer or even a very technical operator, so we're not going to talk about XML vs. HTML, or color scheme and font choices.

Your website is a business communication tool, not an art project.

Repeat that sentence to yourself. Again. One more time. Improvisors are creative people, and often skilled in other artistic fields, so it's natural to want to apply those skills to their troupe's web site. Often, however, the artistic proclivities will overwhelm the business priorities, and you will end up with a site that, while attractive or entertaining, isn't informative. Your web site should quickly give people the following information:

Who are you?
What do you do?
When are you doing it? and
How much it will cost?

They should either have those answers on the home page or be able to get to them easily from the home page. This is the basic reason for the existence of your troupe website, answering these questions. Look at your site, or better, have a friend or colleague do it. See how fast they can find the answers to these questions. If it takes over a minute, you're doing something wrong. Read on.

The basics -
Date, Price Address. Here are some common omissions and errors -- Don't make them!

Dates

When you give show dates, give the year. If you perform every Wednesday at Joe's Bar, put something like "2002 Season" on the same page. Lots of sites are outdated. Don't make yours look like one of them.

If you perform every other Wednesday, that's fine for your troupe to know when to show up, but your audience need to know what Wednesdays. Give the actual dates!

List every show you have booked, as soon as you book them, do not just list your next show. Some groups think if you tell folks you're booked for the next ten weeks, everyone will think they have forever to see the show. While there is some truth in that, you will lose people who need to plan ahead, like parents with children who need babysitters. Other planners are often bringing large groups (which is why they have to plan). If you only have this week's show, they're going to skip you and go see the stand-up show.

Prices

List the price of your show. "Free" is a price, and it's a selling point!

Addresses

Be sure to include both a street address and the town name. Even if "everyone" knows that Joe's Bar is right next to the Starbucks on Main Street, the person who is visiting for the week, or is new in town doesn't know that, and that's potential audience you've lost. The town name is also important for web searches. If someone goes to Google and keys in Dubuque and improvisation, and your site doesn't include the word Dubuque, your site will not be listed in the search results.

Load 'em or lose 'em.

On your home page you want to have all those cool pictures, those little animations, a counter and a joke of the day. They load really quickly on your machine at work, the one with the high speed T1 line, but, according to the Economist magazine, only 9% of homes in the U.S. are currently using high-speed Internet access. You have to test your site on a clunky old 56k modem to see how those effects will display. Make sure that friend who is doing the searching is using a dial-up connection.

Tips for quicker loading:

Use low-resolution graphics and keep the pictures small - The web can't display photos at higher that 72 dpi, so don't you bother with high-level graphics. If you must put a larger picture on your site, learn how to slice your photos. Slicing allows a larger picture to load as many smaller ones, speeding the process.

Get rid of Flash, Shockwave and animations.

Put these on other pages that your users can jump to, but don't put them on your home page.

Pay for your web hosting

Geocities and others provide free web hosting, and you get what you pay for, these sites take a dog's age to load, and also load a number of annoying pop-up windows advertising things that are not your show. These pop-ups make your site look amateur and by extension, your troupe looks amateur. There are a number of companies that will host your site for as little as $7.95 a month. Look around. Improv Review uses www.addr.com and find the service more than adequate. (And we get no compensation for that recommendation.)

Beware of outside "freebies"

It's tempting to add a free counter, a joke of the day, a web ring and a search engine to your home page, but if these features are stored on a site or server other than your own (the HTML will reference another site), think twice about adding them. If a browser has to go out and load these remote features, it takes longer for your pages to load. See if you can load the graphic on your own server and build the link from there, or consider dropping the feature altogether. For an example of how to do this, look at the source for our home page at improvreview.com. We include a link to the Improv Top 50, but rather than load the graphic from their page, we copied it onto our server. (Vote for us, by the way, especially if you're finding this article useful!)

On the subject of web crawlers…

These are 'bots that some search engines use to crawl the web, cataloging the words on your site for searches. Be sure that your show information is in text form on your page. Some groups like to reproduce the artwork from their flyer or postcard on their site. Guess what? The crawler can't read words inside graphics, so your info is not being picked up. And learn about metatags -- they're still used.

Now that you've got the basics out of the way

You've followed all the advice above and now web users can get your basic info quickly and easily. That's pretty boring, so what else should a web site have? Well, just about everything, as long as it's behind a quick loading facade. But here are some things that will definitely help:

Contact information - This can be a simple, "For all inquiries, e-mail info@improvreview.com," or you can have e-mail addresses for every department in your organization. (they may all go to the same person, but who has to know?)

Press release - Have your most current press release available on your site. (And if you don't have a press release, read my article on yesand.com here!) Increasingly reviewers (and not just those from Improv Review) are using the web to research new shows to check out. Make it easy for them. If you can, have high-resolution photos available through a link that a press person could download for publication. This is the only place you want to have high-resolution photos, and only via a link.

Reviews - Have a page with your reviews (all of your positive reviews, anyway). Make sure there's a link to this page from your show information page.

Bios of your players with low-res photos - It's okay to post those goofy bios, but include serious ones as well, not only for press, but also for agents. Remember, your troupe members probably aren't getting paid, so getting them some professional recognition is great for morale.

Information about hiring you - Have a page with this info, with a professionally worded paragraph. This is the time to say, "we can be wacky, but we know how to do business." You don't need to give prices. For an excellent example, see www.comedysportzphilly.com/roadshows.html.

Links to other sites - This is a good thing to do because some search engines will increase your ranking depending on the number of links to and from your site. A bit of advice though, have these links open to a new page or window. (as I've done with every off-site link on this page) This way, your visitor doesn't go off to other sites and forget all about yours. Don't forget to include Improv Review in your links, please.

Some examples

Here are some examples of sites I think are well done, with some notes about what I like about them. Emulate them.

www.ucbtheater.com - The best example of a large site. They have an easy-to-use calendar, with links to show descriptions, prices, and they keep everything updated.

www.improvboston.com - Boom, front and center, tells you where they are, how to make reservations, and what's playing. Nicely laid out with lots of links to information.

www.fourdayweekend.com - Attractive, everything easily accessible.

www.ouibenegroes.com - Lots of pictures, nicely organized

www.barrow-gang.com - great design, loads quick, but has visual impact

www.brodytheater.com - Simple and elegant

Take a good long look at your site, and see what changes need to be made. Then get out from in front of that computer and go improvise!