Melbourne Theatre Company

We have had the privilege to work with MTC on various web design and development projects since 2012. 

In 2017, MTC engaged Made Media in a project to redesign their website.  MTC’s previous website had been live for five years and was starting to reach a point when it no longer represented the organisation’s brand, as well as feeling dated compared to the latest design trends and functionality.

This project aimed to refresh the design and enhance existing functionality of the MTC website in order to create a seamless content-led website that provides a rich experience for audiences pre and post-purchase, with a look and feel that matches the organisation’s other marketing and communication output. MTC wanted the website to become a ‘one-stop-shop’ for tickets, production information, editorial content and any other MTC offering.

The website’s front-end functionality also lacked the content-marketing approach taken by the Company in an effort to focus on owned media. Understanding that the relationship between engagement, reach and attendance is cyclical, MTC wished to increase web visits and engagement, and, in turn, increase online transactions.

The website’s front-end functionality also lacked the content-marketing approach taken by the Company in an effort to focus on owned media.

Understanding that the relationship between engagement, reach and attendance is cyclical, MTC wished to increase web visits and engagement,  and, in turn, increase online transactions.

In doing so, MTC wanted this project to address and improve on the following challenges:

Demographic Shift. Build features that would convert more of their browsing audience (25-34 years old) without alienating the buying audience (55-64 years old). To balance the needs of a younger audience who visit and browse more, and the older audience who buy more.

Strengthening Engagement. On the previous website, 51% of sessions only viewed one page.  MTC work hard to create so much great editorial content and they saw this redesign as a  key opportunity to improve the length and depth of visitor sessions.

Mobile Visitation and Usability. Sessions from mobile devices only represented 38% of MTC’s total sessions at the time of the redesign and had a 52% bounce rate. MTC wanted to see these stats improve along with increasing transactions and revenue from mobile devices.

Increase Content Visitation. Previously, 50% of the traffic to the MTC blog came from email campaigns. This suggested that there was an issue around content discovery on the site. They saw an opportunity with the redesign to increase traffic to their blog articles from other high traffic pages within the site.

Flexibility. Responding to the audience’s online behaviour and content consumption was important to MTC, so it was imperative that the new website wasn’t locked into a strict template with a set hierarchy of information. Instead, each page is now made up of flexible content blocks that can be easily edited and rearranged to adapt the page’s content as required.