Omaha Performing Arts

Extraordinary Arts Entertainment and Learning

Omaha Performing Arts brings a vibrant arts and entertainment experience to the Omaha, Nebraska, community and nearby region. With three facilities and a fourth soon to be opened, O-pa was looking to reinvigorate their website with a new design and more closely tie their ticketing system into the site. Having worked with the O-pa team before on creating a standalone website for one of these facilities — Steelhouse Omaha —, we were excited to dive into this new project.

O-pa brings concerts, Broadway shows, comedians, dance troupes, and so much more to their stages. Additionally, they also support arts education by working with elementary, middle, and high schools across the state for arts-based learning; providing lifelong learning opportunities through classes, workshops, and camps; and partnering with organizations throughout Omaha to offer free community events celebrating different cultures, styles of entertainment, and individuals. With this broad set of offerings, their site needed to bring a massive amount of content to its audiences — at more than 400 pages and posts and 33 forms plus an additional 200 performances syncing from their external ticketing site’s information, this was one of the largest marketing sites our team has built.

Our first step was to help re-envision the navigation and flow of the site. With multiple styles of dropdown menus coming out of our new organizational structure, we helped guide visitors more efficiently through the site. From the backend, our restructuring helped aid the O-pa team with content management with sectioning on the dashboard into specific groups of content and a more parallel structure for the separate venues and programming.

Ease of content management was a top priority for the wireframe stage. With new performances, education programs, and community events popping up throughout the year, each with its unique needs for messaging, the O-pa team needed to be able to spin up a new page or post in a short amount of time with a great amount of flexibility with how to display the text, images, videos, issuu booklets, and PDFs. During wireframes we worked closely to establish layouts, spacing rules, and display features for a large variety of content blocks with variations giving O-pa what they needed for different types of content as well as options to not just inundate visitors with the same layout page after page.

During design we continued the work on the content blocks, applying visual interest, color schemes, iconography, and more to bring movement and life to the text. We planned for interactive elements such as maps, slideshows, and expandable text to invite users to engage more than just moving from page to page. O-pa’s large number of photos really assisted with drawing visitors into the site, bringing excitement, and we were careful to supplement the images with judicious use of color blocks, icon usage, and animations.

The development lift pushed us to new heights with external site connections to pull in O-pa’s shows in a new display configuration, expiring content, synced animations, extensive protected content media center, layered submenus, and Tailwind styling in addition to coding 45 separate content blocks. Add in slideshows, expanding content, integrated maps, database syncing, Vimeo and YouTube integrations, and conditional logic forms, and the new O-pa site allowed us to showcase our development competencies. The result was a greatly improved, efficient site that allowed O-pa to continue to support and serve their community by making it easier for visitors to find performances, educational programs, and community events.