We first made contact with Matt Green, founder of the Palace Drum Clinic (PDC) through our network of friendly companies. The Palace Drum Clinic puts on unique events to get up close and personal with some of the UK’s top drummers, ask them questions, learn from them and connect with other artists.
Matt has been a professional percussionist and teacher for 22 years which enables the PDC to attract a high calibre of musicians. To date, their events have featured some of the UK’s best percussionists including; Pete Lockett, Dougie Wright and Neal Wilkinson.
Matt had constructed the original site for the Palace Drum Clinic using website building tools, and while it was perfectly functional, it was not optimised for mobile devices, less than SEO friendly and could be time-consuming to update.
When funding became available to create a more up-to-date version of the site, we started to discuss the creation of the next generation web presence for PDC, refreshing the look and feel and making use of database website architecture to more dynamically update and display upcoming events and clinics.
We mainly worked remotely with Matt, using teleconferences and collaboration tools to understand more about the great work of the Palace Drum Clinic, the audiences who visit, and possible functionality for the new site.
We followed our standard User Centred Design (UCD) process and created a sitemap that outlined how the site would be structured and the high-level content that would make up the pages.
From this, we created wireframes that laid out the various pages, making more of the amazing drummers that have participated, easier to promote upcoming clinics, and showcased the content including photos and video content from previous clinics.
These wireframes evolved into the ultimate site design, including:
- Events database – we made it easy for Matt to add events, including time/date, venue, price and media, linking in to his existing booking system with the Redditch Palace Theatre.
- Dynamic page content – the soonest upcoming event would automatically take pride of place in the homepage hero area, displayed at the top of the page, along with other areas of the site.
- We created a feature to randomise from a list of the amazing drummers who have featured in past workshops and feature them in key pages.
- A lot of Palace Drum Clinic users engage on a group and page on Facebook, so we integrated the site and dynamically draw social feeds into the page.
- The site is also fully integrated with Mailchimp to capture details of people interested in hearing more about the clinics.
- The content and media were optimised for SEO with the ability to easily optimise other content in future
- Finally, we migrated Matt’s other website and email hosting to our Hosting.
Find out more about our User Experience consultancy, or if you’re after something simple, our Basic Website Package.
If you like what you see, why not get in touch today for a chat, no obligation and no pressure.
