Flagler Auditorium Website Redesign Request for Proposal

I. Project Overview:

The Flagler Auditorium is seeking a qualified, innovative web design firm for a complete overhaul and redesign of our website. While the current site has served us well, it is vastly behind the times and poses many problems as we move our theater soundly into the 21st century. We envision our new website to be clean, intuitive, mobile responsive, and user friendly across a wide demographic. This will be an informative-centered site with full social media integration, e-commerce abilities, and an accessible, secure, and user friendly backend, preferably on a Wordpress CMS. Our expected date of completion is October 31st, 2015.

II. Company Overview:

The Flagler Auditorium is a unique performing arts center, located in Palm Coast, Florida. We were founded in 1991 when our building was built on a bond issue voted for by the community. The primary purpose of the building was and is to serve K-12 arts education in Palm Coast. The Auditorium Governing Board was founded soon after to bring professional touring productions to Flagler County. We produce between 25-30 professional productions each season and another 100 or so events for the community. As such, our website must serve the dual purpose of serving our students, families, and educators, and serving the patrons of our professional shows.

III. Our Audience:

Our website audience ranges from 15-85, literally (sometimes older). While many of our professional show patrons are older, they are increasingly tech savvy, especially in terms of social media and email marketing. Many have even begun to buy tickets online, which is a welcome evolution. We need a site that serves all these theatergoers.

IV. New Website Objectives:

We may be a little biased, but we believe that our theatre provides world class entertainment and one-of-a-kind educational opportunities. Unfortunately, our website is not currently representative of the work we do. Given that we present many of the same shows as place such as the Ruth Eckerd Center, we want to look like we belong. We have also had many complaints about how confusing the site is and how hard it is to find information. And we get it. We’re confused by it too! It’s too dark and the homepage gives too many options. We want to streamline the user experience and clean up the site so it looks fresh.

V. Current Website

Let’s be blunt: our current website has a lot of problems. It’s a relic and we look forward to relegating it to a proverbial museum where it belongs. There have been many moments when we have considered setting it on fire. Our current list of complaints is thus:

● Not mobile responsive. This MUST be fixed. ● Not secure: We have had an ongoing issue with extraneous URLs linking

our website to a pharmacy website in Canada. We are understandably frustrated with the situation.

● Joomla: The back end for Joomla is, simply put, a pain. We are greatly looking forward to a new back end, preferably Wordpress.

● More streamlined navigation: We give far too many options when people first arrive. No one knows where to go. The ‘solution’ we’ve been working with so far has been “let’s put this link on multiple drop-downs, then they’ll find it!” It doesn’t work, and some feel it looks a bit like we don’t know what we’re doing.

● Poorly structured footer: Unlike most other venues in our industry, we do not have a traditional footer with more detailed navigation options. Thus, all our pages are listed in the top menu and it gets exceedingly confusing. We need to fix that!

● The homepage: Look at our homepage for a moment. Do you know where to click first? Neither do we.

● Content management: getting a page to look like we want it to look is an absolute nightmare. Again, we blame Joomla.

VI. New Website Functionality Requirements:

Our new website--which we eagerly anticipate--would include the following:

● Responsive Design ● E-commerce ability which allows us to sell tickets and process orders in

house; also allow for future fully online ticketing option. See appendix. ● Full social media integration ● Mailchimp integration ● Ability to easily create individual, unlisted pages for each professional

event of the season ● Blog hosted on site ● Archive for press releases and media kits ● Easy to access and update calendar for all events ● Footer with navigation: See bottom of site for example of what we’d like. ● CMS with ability to add and delete pages at will ● SEO optimization at every turn

Should it be helpful, please view any of these websites from other area venues, of which we are very fond.

● Ruth Eckerd Hall ● Dr. Phillips Center ● Kauffman Center ● Straz Center

VII. New Website Wish List

Can we make it bigger on the inside? That would be awesome. VIII. E-commerce Details At present, we don’t entirely know what it is we're going to do here. (Shanna, Myself, Richard, and Bill will discuss based on ticketing solution.)

IX. Budget:

To be discussed. This will be contingent--in part--on what our ticketing solution is. X. Proposal Requirements:

Please include the following in submitted proposals:

● Detailed timeline of plans for execution ● Requirements on our end to see project to completion ● Information of the team we will be working with ● Training protocols for back end of site ● Extensive information on chosen CMS ● Hosting agreement ● 2-3 References from previous clients who can attest to work of a similar

scale and scope. Contact information will suffice. XI. Project Timeline

We will be accepting bids and anticipate choosing a vendor by June 30th, at which point the project should commence immediately. We anticipate a website launch date of November 1st, 2015, in conjunction with our new season.

Appendix This is a diagram of how our online ticketing currently works. Yes, it is confusing to look at, but it is also confusing to most of the people who have to work with it, both the customers and in the office. The diagram and the system suit each other very well.