Site of the Month: Royal Albert Hall

August's 'Site of the Month' has been awarded to the Royal Albert Hall. Their website was built by SilverStripe Professional Partner, Made Media.

About Made Media

Since 2002, Made Media has produced best-in-class websites and apps for clients, including theatres, music venues, performing arts centres, museums, broadcast networks, and other creative organisations. With offices in London and New York, Made Media help cultural institutions use technology to connect with their audiences and do better business.

Project background

The Royal Albert Hall is an iconic venue and British institution. A redesign of the website presented an opportunity to focus heavily on content, with the aim of developing a deeper connection between customers and the Royal Albert Hall’s stories and unforgettable experiences for artists and audiences. A shift to a more magazine-style layout with the ability to purchase tickets, would facilitate a richer audience experience.

The Hall had been developing editorial content before the redesign, but was trapped within an add-on WordPress blog.

Made Media’s solution

SilverStripe was used as a cohesive platform to pull together productions, archived content, blog and news content within a single platform. SilverStripe’s extensibility allowed Made Media to develop custom modules connecting to Tessitura’s ticketing and CRM software, Third-Light’s digital Media Library platform and CalmView’s archive catalogue platform.

Made Media’s CTO Sealan Cronin explains that Made Media’s selection of SilverStripe was less about the availability of modules, and more about the underlying MVC framework. Royal Albert Hall’s content is cross-referenced using Sapphire’s relational features and leverages the enterprise-class versioning, workflow and permission controls that SilverStripe offers.

The Royal Albert Hall website has a page count of over 3,000, and is growing all the time. That requires enterprise-level content management. In addition, many of those pages represent highly structured data, such as performances with fixed dates and times, so we needed a CMS that could handle a complex relational data model mapped onto publishing workflows. There aren’t many Content Management Systems with that combination, especially in the Open Source world.

The site is hosted on AWS based on an auto-scaling architecture. The ability to scale fast is particularly critical as traffic levels can go from zero-to-eleven at the drop of a hat when a major act is announced.

Modules used

• silverstripe/framework for the SilverStripe framework
• silverstripe/userforms to create dynamic forms via a drag and drop interface
• silverstripe/cms for the SilverStripe Content Management System
• silverstripe/redirectedurls for users to configure arbitrary redirections in the CMS
• silverstripe-taxonomy Provide extra taxonomy for cataloguing the data
• silverstripe/sortablegridfield for adding drag and drop to SilverStripe 4.x's GridField
• unclecheese/betterbuttons to add new form actions and buttons to GridField detail form
• silverstripe/multivaluefield  for storing multiple values in a single property
• silverstripe/newrelic to support NewRelic for SilverStripe
• silverstripe/googlesitemaps to support Google Sitemaps XML and increase searchability

The Results

Since launching, mobile traffic has increased by 45%, with mobile revenue increasing by 160%. Non-transactional visits increased by 250%.

The site was also featured on the Responsive Design Podcast as a great example of mobile-first design.

Building a website or have something to feature? 

If you are interested in working with Made Media, please contact the team via the Made Media website.

Want to get your own work showcased? Head to our showcase section and submit your site!