Nightwood Theatre Website Redesign

PHP, HTML/CSS, JavaScript

Designer, Developer

Wordpress

The current website for Nightwood Theatre did not accurately display the vibrant and modern feel that the Nightwood organization brings to the Toronto theatre scene. Myself and one other designer/developer were tasked with the job of redesigning the Nightwood website to give it a fresh look, reflecting a number of recent changes to their marketing collateral materials. We did this using Wordpress, giving Nightwood a back-end system they could use effectively to manage their website in-house.

DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

The project began with the Nightwood team selecting several Wordpress themes they were interested in using. My partner and I completed an analysis of Nightwood’s existing website, compiling notes on areas for improvement, as well as completing an analysis of the themes selected, ranking the options for accessibility and responsiveness.

When the team settled on a theme to use, we began customizing the theme to meet the needs of the website. The main concern for the website was ensuring that the donation button was always visible, and the navigation structure was easy to use and made sense for users.

Another focus as we built the website was ensuring that it was built in a way that was simple enough for the team to use in-house. Through a simple page building plugin, on-page content is easily editable for the team in a way that makes sense for them, with all design elements hardcoded in the child theme, making it easy for the team to edit and add pages as needed.

SCREENSHOTS

New Nightwood Theatre homepage design. The "Musings" section functions as a blog feed with specific content, giving the team more control over what the user sees first when they land on the site.

Community choir page. Nightwood requested the use of toggled content, to make pages with large amounts of content feel less overwhelming to the user.

Donation page, with a link to Canada Helps and donation information

Education and Outreach program. The main task of this page was finding a way to display the education guides in an exciting way so that users would want to click on the PDF link.