This is topic Creating a Theatre Website in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.


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Posted by Joshua Lott (Member # 240) on 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,
 
Posted by Jack Ondracek (Member # 1466) on 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!
 
Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 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.
 
Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 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! [Mad]
Banner ads! [Mad]
POP UPS! [Mad]
Websites that only work in IE! [Mad]

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.
 
Posted by Jeff Taylor (Member # 443) on 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.
 
Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 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.
 
Posted by Matthew Peters (Member # 1495) on 12-22-2003, 09:38 PM:
 
All the ideas mentioned above are good design principals [thumbsup] , 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
 
Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 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.
 
Posted by Matthew Peters (Member # 1495) on 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.
 
Posted by Adam Fraser (Member # 1074) on 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.
 
Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 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.
 
Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 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.
 
Posted by John Lasher (Member # 968) on 12-23-2003, 01:48 PM:
 
Avoid annoying and slow-loading animated .gifs like the one on this awful excuse for a website .
 
Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 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.
 
Posted by Scott Jentsch (Member # 1681) on 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).
 
Posted by Joshua Lott (Member # 240) on 12-23-2003, 10:27 PM:
 
I do like the Rialto Cinema website.

What are the thoughts on Black background/ White backgroung?

I do not want a counter on the website. I do only want the information for statistical purposes. My own pleasure. [Smile]

There will be NO banner ads, popups, or flash (I don't know how to program flash).

As to various browsers. What browsers should I test the website to? I know Opera, Netscape, and Explorer. Are there others? I will not be able to test on a Mac, as I do not have one.

What are thoughts on PayPal? I do want to offer Gift Certificates and Tickets online, but I can't stand fandango.

Once I finally get the website up I will let everyone here know so they can pic it apart to see what is good/bad with it.

Thanks
 
Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 12-24-2003, 12:04 AM:
 
White background versus black backgrounds? Text is a lot easier to read on a white or light colored background. You don't have to apply this on all pages. But do be kind and use white backgrounds in fields where you have paragraphs of text to display.

You should test your site with Internet Explorer and Netscape. Opera is also gaining popularity. Other browsers include Mozilla, Safari (Mac), Konqueror (Linux), Amaya (the W3C's browser), Camino (formerly Chimera). ISPs like SBC/Yahoo! are even making their own web browsers. You'll do fine to test in the first two or three mentioned. There's just not enough time in the world to test in many more than that (although you could since most are free).

The Mac versus PC thing is a fairly big issue affecting web design. Macs display colors lighter than PCs, so you may have to balance the look of your images. Applications like Photoshop and Fireworks can simulate both Mac and PC gamma on a single machine. Font handling and choices are different too. This will be a big consideration if you mess around with more advanced things like Cascading Style Sheets ("CSS").

Pay Pal? Well, I'm not a big eBay junkie. And generally I'm just not into doing any Internet-based pay online systems. When I order items online, I prefer to pick up the phone and call in the order. Even with my anti-virus DATs auto-updated, anti-spyware tools running and my computer sitting behind both a hardware firewall (my router) and software firewall (ZoneAlarm) I still don't trust punching in any keystrokes of credit card numbers or any other personal information. I treat my computer as if everyone else in the world can see what I am doing on it. Paranoid perhaps, but safe.
 
Posted by Adam Martin (Member # 641) on 12-24-2003, 02:30 AM:
 
I typically test websites on the following browsers and versions:
Keep in mind if you plan on your viewers to print anything out (showtimes, coupons, etc.), most browsers only do about 640 pixels wide to the printer before stuff starts getting cut off.
 
Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 12-24-2003, 01:27 PM:
 
A black background is OK if you don't use dark colors for body text. Especially don't use purple or dark blue. Use white or yellow or light colors in general.

And make the text large enough.

I really like the way the Rialto site has complete movie info on the front page. I'm going to do that with our site. We have the showtimes on the front now, with a link to "more information," but I guess it is true that most people are looking for movie information, so it should be right up front.
 
Posted by Tim Reed (Member # 137) on 12-24-2003, 01:40 PM:
 
One annoying website practice: you type in the URL, and the first thing you see is...

"Welcome to Joe Blow's Website! Click to Enter"

When I typed the URL, I expected to enter already! Why make everyone go through a stupid, unnecessary screen?! Get to the point!
 
Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 12-24-2003, 11:59 PM:
 
Such enter screens are a waste of time unless there is a point to them -the main point being a notification of what plug ins and other stuff the site uses, or making it as a jump point between a broadband heavy graphics version or "lite" version of the site.
 
Posted by Scott Jentsch (Member # 1681) on 12-26-2003, 01:06 PM:
 
Such welcome screens are also a very good way to make sure that search engines don't rank you very highly. Cut to the chase and don't waste your visitors' time, and you will also be rewarded with valuable search engine ranks that are appropriate to the relevance of your site.

I used to do the colored backgrounds, and BigScreen once had a dark blue background with white text. I even experimented with different colors and/or subtle patterns that varied with the section that you were in, but all-in-all, black text on white is how people have been viewing text for years, and messing with that means that you're going to lose some effectiveness to your site.

Another highly recommmended thing to do, is to follow conventions for coloring of links and allowing the browser to choose whether to underline them or not. I dislike sites that make their links the same color as the body text, since I set my browser to not have links underlined. I'm also annoyed by sites that force all links to be underlined. If I wanted them underlined, I would have set that option in my browser!

Currently, I have movie information on the same page as the showtimes. The movie information is at the top, followed by the showtimes below. I've been using this layout for all nine years (nine years in January anyway), and it has worked well.

Showtimes Page for Cold Mountain

We also have a separate page for printable showtimes, since what works for viewing doesn't necessarily translate well when printed. We also want to make sure that the showtimes print on a single page whenever possible, so only basic movie information is on the printable page.

Printable Showtimes Page for Cold Mountain

This printable page also has the side benefit of being very compatible with AvantGo users and mobile wireless devices.

PayPal is a hit-and-miss situation. I think people who already have PayPal accounts will have no problem paying for tickets with PayPal. Those that don't, however, will probably not want to sign up just to order tickets online. Unfortunately, there's no cheap way to accept Credit Cards online, so your overhead will be high for that option.

I do compatibility testing with IE 6, Mozilla 1.5, and Netscape 4.77. The latter is only when I am doing something that I know will make NS 4.77 a little touchy. This list is a result of knowing how most browsers will display the code that I write, based on the years of experience I have with doing so. If you are new to this, and especially if you are using a program to generate code (like FrontPage), you're going to want to be more vigilant to make sure that you're not insulting those that don't use IE.

I've always said that I would love to do more compatibility testing with the Mac platform, but so far, Apple has ignored my requests for an evaluation sample. [Big Grin]

As you can tell by all the issues involved, designing good web sites is not simple and straightforward. Sure, everyone can create a web page, but not everyone should...
 
Posted by Dennis Atkinson (Member # 345) on 12-27-2003, 08:47 AM:
 
I like and use www.sitehost4u.com
for easy info/stats menu. I'm sure everyone has a favorite.

Adam, you should try www.webstudio.com for a free download.
The latest version of webstudio is too easy to use!

Dennis
 
Posted by Adam Martin (Member # 641) on 12-27-2003, 09:12 PM:
 
All web design software sucks. It should be called bloatware. For instance Web Studio's plain-Jane homepage weighs in at a whopping 52K and it's mostly text! Notepad rules.
 
Posted by Joshua Lott (Member # 240) on 12-28-2003, 05:31 PM:
 
Adam,

You offering to write my website for me in notepad? [Wink]

To all:

Anyways... I have a friend that will probably do this website for me in Dreamweaver.

I do want my website to resize to the persons browser. Is this possible?

Bobby Said:

quote:
Most computer users have small to medium sized monitors running at no more than 800 X 600 pixels.
So should I have it designed to 800x600? I don't like to have to scroll side to side to look at a web site. It should fit in the width of the screen. This is a personally opion and maybe not what the general public is used to. I am creating the website for them, not me.

I am running my screen at 1024 x 768 and I like how Film-Tech looks even if I pull the frame over that is around the navigation and chat info.

I am personally thinking about going with a website that has a header similar to cinematour.com with the logo on the left and links to the right.

Front page would have all the current releases summary and showtimes with link to purchase tickets.

Any additional thoughts?
 
Posted by Ray Brown (Member # 1449) on 12-28-2003, 06:32 PM:
 
quote:
I do want my website to resize to the persons browser. Is this possible?
I haven't seen any scripts that redirect according to your screens resolution. Someone who knows more about Java script might be able to answer that or write a script for you.

Running individual pages for each resolution size, or type of browser seems like a real pain in the butt to me, especially when you are updating at least once a week but that's just my opinion and I like keeping things as simple as possible.

I designed ours at 800x600 since it is the default setting in Windows and 60% of our visitors use this setting so that is what I'm staying with even though I prefer 1024x768 for my own pc.

For web editors I prefer Dreamweaver. Very spendy but creates really clean code compared to Front Page. I also like the split screen where you can have your source code and the wysiwyg showing at the same time. Sometimes you have to go in to the source code and "tweak" it when you can't get the wysiwyg to do what you want and this feature really comes in handy.
 
Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 12-28-2003, 07:05 PM:
 
Here's another design tip for properly designing for medium to small-ish computer screen desktops. Certainly you want to make the site work on a 800 X 600 desktop. But you also have to bear in mind the browser's user interface (or "chrome") is going to consume a pretty good amount of pixels. In general I limit the horizontal spread of a layout to 740 or 750 pixels.

Use the print screen function to copy chromes of popular web browsers to the clipboard and use those screen shots as frames for your layouts.

The "liquid" design technique can get around lots of monitor and desktop setting issues. Basically you have a table design that automatically expands to the width of the browser window. You can make parts of a liquid layout fixed while other parts expand to gain more visual control of the layout.

Cascading Style Sheets raises issues at the other end of the monitor spectrum. CSS allows you to use certain fonts and specify sizes in pixels and more. Generally I prefer the look of sites that use CSS. But the text needs to be designed so it is readable on high rez desktops. If I can't read the text on a 1600 X 1200 or 1900 X 1440 desktop then it will probably be too small for people with limited vision using average sized monitors to read as well.
 
Posted by Gunnar Johansson (Member # 1661) on 12-29-2003, 12:06 PM:
 
quote:
Running individual pages for each resolution size, or type of browser seems like a real pain in the butt to me, especially when you are updating at least once a week but that's just my opinion and I like keeping things as simple as possible.
But it doesnīt have to be. Without to much work you can do it with databases and asp, or php, to get easy to maintain, entering information once and get it displayed wherever relevant. Notepad isnīt to bad, but updating at least movies, and maybe showtimes, Iīd rather build an interface dynamically, so I can input data by maybe logging in, rather than editing html in notepad and uploading. Especially if you want to delegate so more people can enter information.
Look into MSSQL and ASP (basically what Iīm most familar with and know it works, having tons of trouble getting MSSQL and PHP to work properly on Linux a while back).
Granted Iīm not to sure how this does with slow modems and other browsers... Hope I helped, made sense and Iīm sorry I canīt direct you to a good example.

Iīm expanding on the subject, agreeing with most posts above, but like to add that it should be easy to maintain and look good a while from now. Iīve seen plenty of siteīs which looked good and cool once, and they donīt now. And sites that never get updated with relevant information. Build a good solid structure and foundation that you know will last (HTML will most likely work for a while longer) and as a general advice make sure you comment your code, so you know whatīs what when you go back, or when the next guy is trying to do something (another reason for easy maintanence). This doesnīt negate anything else, just start thinking about before you do anything (as opposed to after). Hope this helped som more, and good luck.
(Edit spelling mistakes and last paragraph)
 
Posted by Scott Jentsch (Member # 1681) on 12-29-2003, 02:18 PM:
 
BigScreen does what you're looking for, Joshua. While the navigation at the top does not go all the way down to 640 wide-browsers (that element lets you get down to 712 wide before scrolling), the content itself does stretch to fit any available width.

It's not difficult to do this, just stay away from manually setting the widths of the tables that contain your content. You can specify widths of certain columns, but if you specify a table width or if you specify the width of every column, you are going to run into trouble where it won't fit a majority of browsers, whether they are wide or narrow.

FrontPage likes to pull crap like that, and it's one of the dead give-aways of an amatuer job when I evaluate sites for customers.

You said that your friend will be using Dreamweaver to create your site. In my experience, DW can be used to create very clean sites, but I've never let it generate a page that was created using just the visual layout tools (affectionately referred to as "web design for dummies").
 
Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 12-29-2003, 06:13 PM:
 
The problem with Dreamweaver (particuarly the MX version) is the program's "layout view", an alternative to the app's much more reliable "standard view." Macromedia developed this as an "easy mode" for newcomers to design web pages. In reality it is a feature to avoid. DWMX Layout view auto-generates many levels of nested tables to achieve that WYSIWYG appearance. The feature works, but good luck going back and editing the content. Such auto-generated pages are impossible to edit within text-based editors and they're a real pain to deal with even if you're working within the confines of DWMX itself.

Adobe GoLive has a similar feature in their "layout grid". I have to admit there have been times where I have caved in to using this feature, but I would follow up with typing in remarks in the HTML file to say when the layout grid began and ended.

I still prefer DreamweaverMX above all other graphically oriented web design applications. I work in the two-pane Standard View (the HTML code is placed in a window above and the layout appears in a window below). I wish GoLive offered it. You can click an entry point in the HTML text window and it will select items within the layout window below. No need for zooming or manually pulling things around to get the item you want selected. And you're not having to tab back and forth between totally separate views. In addition, the DWMX two pane view gives users interactive feedback between the layout and HTML so you actually learn more about how HTML works as you design (and you have those reference tabs off to the right to describe how every tag works). There's lots of other stuff in DWMX that just gets work done faster.

I haven't tried GoLiveCS yet. I hear it has a really nice "visual CSS" editor.
 
Posted by Gary Crawford (Member # 2038) on 12-30-2003, 01:39 PM:
 
There are 1,001 ways to build a website, but all I ask is that they are simple and to the point. 37 pictures and dancing bears tend to make me lose interest and X it away.

If you have a logo, try to keep it as uncomplicated as possible so it loads quickly. One pic is fine, show the front of your building. Then give me the who-what-wheres-etc, and KEEP IT UPDATED! I am NOT interested in the show you were running 2 weeks ago. Important info of course...prices, titles, times, directions, phone.

If your theatre is a showplace from the glory days, by all means show it off, but on another page. "Click here to see pictures of our luxurious lobby and proscenium arch". People expect a pic page to take a minute or two to load.

Unless Coca-Cola is paying you, don't bother plugging the products of your concession stand. Tell me if you pop your own popcorn and use real butter though.

Hit counters don't mean much to anyone.

Unnecessary musical backgrounds take too long to load. I don't want to hear a movie theme thanks.

Keep it simple. A lot easier to maintain too.
 
Posted by Ray Brown (Member # 1449) on 12-31-2003, 03:39 PM:
 
quote:
Moderator screams: IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO QUOTE THE ENTIRE POST DIRECTLY ABOVE YOURS! Please read the FAQ.
That's what I had in mind when I designed ours. Also, keep it easy to navigate.

The index or frontpage is very simple and not cluttered. Logo at the top, picture of the marquee at dusk showing off the neon lighting in the right table cell, navigation buttons in the left table cell along with theater address, phone number, managers email address at the bottom. Since the town is so small and the theater is right on Main Street, we didn't feel a map was necessary. Anyway the marquee really stands out, especially at night!

Since our theater was originally built in 1910, I have a seperate history page along with a complete tour of what the building looks like today.

As for background music, most midis suck! [bs]

Liberty Theater
 
Posted by Franklin Armstrong (Member # 1448) on 12-31-2003, 07:39 PM:
 
Just don't make it like www.zotatheatres.com make it a web site you would want everyone to have for there home page!!!!! [beer]
 
Posted by Ian Price (Member # 14) on 12-31-2003, 10:08 PM:
 
5 clicks to find a show time on the Zota website! [Eek!]

I clicked back once when I couldn't find the show times, but there was a link on the page.
 
Posted by Joshua Lott (Member # 240) on 01-01-2004, 12:24 AM:
 
I like the way ArcLight Cinemas website is designed.

Ian,

Did you design your own website?
 
Posted by Steve Anderson (Member # 364) on 01-01-2004, 08:41 AM:
 
I like the Rialto website....very clean and to the point.
 
Posted by Gary Crawford (Member # 2038) on 01-01-2004, 12:14 PM:
 
Mr. Brown, what a great site! This is exactly what I had in mind! A textbook example of a user-friendly site, great info, neat and clean and easy to read. IMO, perfect! Congrats on a good job.
 
Posted by Ray Brown (Member # 1449) on 01-01-2004, 06:26 PM:
 
Thank you! Our former manager and I looked at other theater websites last summer and took what we liked and added some of our own ideas.

We both wanted something that was easy to navigate and read.

Color scheme was easy. I took the interior colors of the theater and played with the tables untill I got the right effect.

I do like the Rialto site. If all we did was show movies, I would probably go with something like that. With live productions along with community events as part of the schedule, we decided to go with the current layout.

Thanks again--Ray
 
Posted by William Hooper (Member # 71) on 01-05-2004, 03:08 AM:
 
Put a picture of the front of your theater on the page, so people can find it.

"3673 West 60-mile Unnumbered Shopping Center and Tire Store Boulevard" doesn't help any at all.
 




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