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Author Topic: Creating a Theatre Website Joshua Lott Expert Film Handler Posts: 246 From: Fairbanks, AK, USA Registered: Nov 1999 posted 12-22-2003 12:53 PM                        I am in the process of creating a website for my traveling theatre. I am looking for suggestions and examples of other websites. The Arctic Cinema Temp Website The above link is to my very temporary website. I am also intersted in having statistical information available to me. Are the free counters and statistical stuff worth anything or do I need to purchase something? Thanks,  |  IP: Logged Jack Ondracek Film God Posts: 2348 From: Port Orchard, WA, USA Registered: Oct 2002 posted 12-22-2003 01:21 PM                        Wow... talk about a personal choice issue!!! Our sites have evolved over the years, though I admit to being nowhere near as smart about such things as many people on this board. We started ours in '96 with a simple text screen. Today, our sites are not by any means the most flashy, but they reflect a certain amount of progress, tempered severely by the fact that I do just about all of the updates myself (read: wish I had more time!). I haven't done much with flash creation, but I do find myself being irritated while waiting for a logo screen to load and "impress me". In those cases, I appreciate (and almost always use) the "skip" link. A lot of that content takes up a bunch of time to download anyway, especially for dial-up users. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I'd just as soon keep it simple, easy to download, and to the point. Stat counters are a toss-up for me. I used to put them on my sites, but eventually decided that there wasn't any real practical purpose for them. After all, if your reason for visiting my site was to find out what time a show started, why would you care how many people have visited the site since January of 1992? On the other hand, unless you artifically inflate the numbers (which don't fool everyone), low initial counts might give people the impression that nobody cares about your theatre. If I were to use stat info at all, it would be from the background logging that comes with my hosting service... intended for my personal benefit and not for public bragging. Other than that, probably the one thing I've had local site designers say that's made the most impression on me recently is that, as much as is possible, you should consider putting as much of the really important stuff on the top of whatever page your viewers click to, rather than force them to scroll down to see everything. Apparently, the thought is that you're less likely to have them miss something you really wanted them to see. In any case, just getting started was a good choice. We get a lot of activity on ours, and their use by the public continues to increase. Good luck with your project!  |  IP: Logged Scott Norwood Film God Posts: 8146 From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 12-22-2003 01:26 PM                        What Jack said. Keep it simple. Customers want showtimes, prices, directions, and phone numbers. They might also want movie descriptions and a list of what's coming soon. It would be nice to have some pictures and information about the venues as well as a short blurb of the history of the company. Check out the web site for Ian's and Ky's theatre; it's a pretty good example that provides the information that their customers want in a simple, straightforward manner. There are lots of web stats programs that can analyze the log files (usually in "common log format" or "extended common log format") from the hosting provider. I like one called "Analog," which is free, but there are commercial offerings as well.  |  IP: Logged Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 12-22-2003 04:12 PM                     Definitely check out Ian and Ky's site. It is www.rialtocinemas.com It's a good example of how to do a good theater website. Things to stay away from: Flash! Banner ads! POP UPS! Websites that only work in IE! Try and keep pictures on your webpage small in filesize so they load quickly for dialup users. If you want a general "welcome" page with navigational links that's fine, but keep it very simple and alltogether small in filesize. From there people can always click on the "SHOWTIMES" link. I wouldn't make people do more than one click to get to those times though.  |  IP: Logged Jeff Taylor Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 601 From: Chatham, NJ/East Hampton, NY Registered: Apr 2000 posted 12-22-2003 04:30 PM                     You'll note that most historic or special venue theaters have an interesting section on their history. Building from that, and considering the relatively unusual nature of your venture it seems that you should go into the topic of how you mount your shows, and give people an idea of the professionalism of your presentation so they don't think they're going to see a single 16mm projector on a card table doing changeovers in the school gym. I'm being facetious, but I know you plan a quality show and you should explain how you're going to do it.  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 12-22-2003 07:31 PM                     Joshua, here's a few suggestions: Organize your content! What information will users seek the most on your website? Showtimes? Whatever it is get it on the front page. Get all the content organized before you mess around designing buttons and other junk. Users should be able to get to much of your website's content in no more than a couple clicks. Design your site within some reasonable limits. Most computer users have small to medium sized monitors running at no more than 800 X 600 pixels. Most are on slow dialup connections. Don't make them have to download any more than 30K to 60K per page. If you have content that requires high speed connections separate that stuff to a different version of your site. Counters? I don't like them. First, most sites I see using them use all sorts of other java-trickery trinket stuff and they look like shit. Most websites across the Internet look like shit because nothing is done to stop clutter (not to mention most people getting paid to design websites have zero art or design talent). Counters just strike me as being tacky. Second, they create a negative impression against your site if it doesn't get a lot of hits. Any site hosting company worth a damn will have tools and stats folders on their servers for you to get accurate views of the traffic for your site. There is no need at all to make those things public. I agree with Brad 100% about the banner ads and unrequested pop ups. The only time a pop up is any good is when it is something (like a map for instance) that only appears when the user clicks on a link to make it appear. Then he doesn't have the burden of hitting the back button and making the previous page load all over again. DHTML <DIV> layers can be used in similar fashion to streamline the appearance of a page and cut down on clutter. Such methods have to be used very carefully because they can create a lot of confusion if not well organized. Flash? Well, there's both good and bad examples of it on many websites (mostly bad). The main sin committed by many Flash fanboys is creating movies that take too long to load and seem stupidly self important. I use Flash a lot. But much of what I do with Flash is still images. I can create title bars or even big illustrations in Flash that are much smaller in file size and far better looking that what would have resulted by using GIF. The main lesson to be learned in web design is to design within a sense of economy. Most well designed sites are fairly conservative looking, but still good looking as well. The content has to be easily and quickly accessible. If someone has to wait 30 seconds for some big JPEG image to load before he can even see some showtime listings he'll click that stop button and go elsewhere.  |  IP: Logged Matthew Peters Expert Film Handler Posts: 179 From: Glen Waverley, Melbourne, Australia Registered: Nov 2002 posted 12-22-2003 09:38 PM                     All the ideas mentioned above are good design principals , especially bobby’s limitation factors (ie screen size & dial-up users). Make sure you include a reasonable amount of image relief (A.K.A. “White Space) like this forum – it’s easy on the eyes. I must say the front page of this site looks better now, compared to the black background we used to have (sorry Brad). As for counters you seem to be more interested in “statistical” information than just a hit counter for the public to see, check with your service provider to see if they keep logs or statistical info – ours do and they are great. If not you can add a free hit counter to your page, you can get some that are simply a white jpeg you put on your page, which is never seen by the user but still counts the page hits for your Convenience. Take a look over at the Waverley Cinemas website. Waverley Cinemas website And here is an example of a good schedule  |  IP: Logged Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 12-22-2003 09:58 PM                     Thumbs down for the Waverly cinema website. #1 It is not various browser-friendly. IE only. #2 The showtime link provided is unnecessarily confusing. When someone wants to attend the cinema, they are 9 times out of 10 looking for a specific movie. As such, if you wanted to see a certain film, you have to look through the whole list to find when that movie is starting. (Some of the links lead to the wrong websites too.) The showtimes are a great touch though. I wish more theaters would do that. It also loaded very fast, which is a big positive as well. However the first two kills using that as an online resource if that theater was in my area and I was going to attend. Too much effort.  |  IP: Logged Matthew Peters Expert Film Handler Posts: 179 From: Glen Waverley, Melbourne, Australia Registered: Nov 2002 posted 12-22-2003 10:28 PM                     Brad, I would agree with you 100% with #1 problem, the site favours IE, I have tried to make it work better with other browsers but there is something in the JavaScript for the navigation that causes a problem with the other browsers. I assume that this did not load in your case, as you would have seen that the site offers the choice of searching for a show time By Date By Movie By Price I am open to suggestion and if anyone can tell me specifically how the site could be made to work better with other browsers I would not hesitate to make changes.  |  IP: Logged Adam Fraser Master Film Handler Posts: 499 From: Houghton Lake, MI, USA Registered: Dec 2001 posted 12-22-2003 11:45 PM                        I kept our simple when I redesigned it, mainly because I dont really want to get into learning all the computer languages. www.pinestheater.com Just a few links on the side in a frames page. And I make sure everything works in IE and Netscape. As for hit counters, it really doesnt matter too much to me. We use www.extreme-dm.com or something like that, click on the logo on the bottom of our webpage. It was useful when a squatter got a hold of our old primary domain name and we had to start again with the new one, it helped us measure the amount of people finding the new domain.  |  IP: Logged Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 12-23-2003 12:03 AM                     Matthew, the trick is not to use Java. Just compose in plain html and you won't have any problems. It's also a good idea to download and install as many browsers on your computer as you can to test with.  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 12-23-2003 11:56 AM                        The most annoying thing for a dialup user is slow-loading pictures. Use a program like Photoshop Elements and its "Save for Web" function to compress images for fast loading. Low quality is fine for small pictures. Anything higher than "medium" isn't really necessary in a theatre site.  |  IP: Logged John Lasher Master Film Handler Posts: 493 From: Newark, DE Registered: Aug 2001 posted 12-23-2003 01:48 PM                        Avoid annoying and slow-loading animated .gifs like the one on this awful excuse for a website .  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 12-23-2003 07:35 PM                     For those who are able to afford PhotoshopCS, that new version has a pretty nice selective compression engine for getting the most efficiency out of JPEG exports. You can apply a severe level of compression to areas on a background or area of the image you don't care about while applying different, milder rates of compression to areas protected by alpha channel masks or separate layers. I would expect Macromedia Fireworks to copy that idea PDQ. Even with that being said, you want to avoid that Sistine Chapel Syndrome of throwing a buttload of visual stuff onto a single page.  |  IP: Logged Scott Jentsch Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1061 From: New Berlin, WI, USA Registered: Apr 2003 posted 12-23-2003 08:37 PM                        Counters are more evil than frames, so don't disgrace your site by using them. They are an immediate give-away that your site was done by an unskilled person. Any web hosting provider worth paying is going to be able to provide you with at least one statistics reporting package. My hosting for web design customers offers two different kinds, with the option to download the raw logs and have fun with the package of your choice. On BigScreen, I also offer my theaters the ability to see daily page views to their information, and then also compare that to neighboring theaters. In general, design is not as important as the information, but it should not be forsaken entirely, either. Allow the form to follow function, not the other way around. I will repeat the comments of the others. Don't design your site so that it only works and/or looks good in IE. Even though IE now represents more than 95% of the page views to my site, I would never consider shunning that other 5%. I use Mozilla as my primary browser, so I am one of that 5%! There's no excuse for a site that isn't compatible with browsers made in the past couple of years. BigScreen is viewable in the text browser Lynx (as far as I know, it's been a while since I looked at it that way).  |  IP: Logged

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