More

Okay, I have wandered around the new SFO web site, and can report a couple more things.

• The mobile web site has exactly the same content and layout as the desktop site; that is, they've used responsive design.
• On the good side, this means the type is very large and readable on the desktop. On the down side, this means you scroll an awful lot.
• It's very easy to read on a smartphone, and mine doesn't have an unusually large screen.
• Cast & Creative team is too far down the page. Maybe get that above the trivia, which includes something about....The Barber of Seville? And get it above the place where you're touting subscriptions.

You Might Be a Little Confused.

A recent trend in web site style is to have a home page that scrolls, and scrolls, and scrolls, largely robbing you of any sense of location on the site, and hiding stuff, because you don't know how far you need to scroll. They look splashy, and to my mind they don't actually work very well.

SF Opera has gone and provided us with one of these on their redesigned web site.

I happen to have a rather strong preference for a web site where you see a bunch of links and can tell what will happen when you click one. So....this will take some getting used to.

I can report that the press photo presentation is greatly improved over the old web site, though.

And by the way, that's Brian Mulligan in the blond wig and beard, as Enrico in Lucia. That definitely confused me.

The BSO Answers

A couple of postings back, I wondered out loud, very loudly, about the Tanglewood website design. I now have a tweet from the BSO in response my tweet last night about the hidden information there:

This is part of the cleaner design of the site 

Oh, dear.

"Clean design" should not be the goal of a web site. An arts organization's web site needs to do two things as well as it possibly can:

1. Provide information.
2. Make it easy to buy tickets.

A "cleaner design" that hides information defeats both those purposes. There's less information readily visible, which means people have to work a little harder to get the information they need for decision-making purposes. I mean, I always want to know who's playing and conducting a concert before I buy the tickets.