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The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra came to Atlanta based Tribal Chicken Designs for a redesign of their existing web site. They sought a new design that would appeal to a wider audience, promote ticket sales, enhance interactivity and feature educational tools while still supporting their brand image on a local, national and global stage.
The new web site had to make it easy for the site visitors to sample music, search a calendar and purchase tickets in as few clicks as possible. Likewise the client wanted to highlight the various concert series packages throughout the site.
Design:
At first glance, users immediately notice the bright new color palette and photography-rich design. The challenge was to create a site that looked musical in nature, but modern and contemporary – and, most importantly, didn’t rely on clichéd imagery. The design had to appeal to a diverse audience consisting of users of all ages and varying levels of web proficiency.
Calls-to-action in the style of banner ads help direct users quickly and easily to some of the areas of greatest interest, including the subscription series and interactive calendar. A streamlined content structure ensures that users can find what they’re looking for quickly and easily; and clear directional paths let them know where they are at all times and how to easily navigate back to where they were.
Several interactivity enhancements were carefully considered as a means to keep users on the site longer. These include the click-to-play streaming audio and video, and click-to-purchase tickets and CDs, and a detailed Composer Library and in-depth “Meet the Musicians” page. Upcoming enhancements will include an interactive timeline and a robust section for kids that will feature musical games and activities as a means to educate and recruit new classical music fans.
Development:
The ASO Web site is hosted on a .NET 1.1 Web container within Microsoft IIS server. Several pages within the Web site feature rich media components authored in Macromedia Flash. These components include:
- Calendar Component
This component displays the current month’s events calendar with the option of selecting a total of twelve months. The individual days allow a rollover to display the event detail. This component calls the event component if an event is selected it takes the user to the Ticket Master website to purchase tickets. The calendar remembers the last month the user selected per session using Flash, JavaScript and the session created by the .Net container.
- Event Component
This component displays the details of an event when selected from the calendar, text and images meta data is retrieved dynamically from the content management system at runtime. The event component is launched by the user selecting an event either from the calendar component or from the home page events list.
- Media Player
The media player is launched by the event details component and plays rich media such as video and mp3 files. The media is stored in an assets table in the content management system. The .Net components query the assets meta data and forward it via remoting to the Flash components, the on-page component then loads the mp3 and video assets from the file system based on the data from the content management system.
- Google Search Appliance Integration
The Google Search Appliance allows site visitors to search the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra web site in the same way as they would normally search Google. This cost effective appliance is an integrated hardware and software solution which can search multiple document file formats and websites. Increased brand awareness is maintained while search results are displayed within the overall design of the website.
All components support "deep linking", one complaint about websites that incorporate Flash is the inability to bookmark a page properly. The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Web site Flash-components are all “state” aware, when a user uses a link to the Chastain Website in their browser, the Flash components can interpret the link and display the appropriate data to the visitor as is common with a regular HTML page link.
Communication Protocol
The Flash components retrieve assets from the content management system which Tribal Chicken built on top of the existing ASO Microsoft SQL database. The data housed in Microsoft SQL server is retrieved by the .NET application and sent to the Flash components via Macromedia remoting technology. This follows an industry-standard architecture for Rich Internet Applications.
Event Viewer Example
The event viewer is displayed on a calendar-user interaction or from the home page list of event items. The event component itself has no dependency on the page it is displayed on or what component called it.
The site launched in September 2006. The ASO site now features a bold new design, a streamlined content structure and enhanced interactivity.
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