Arts Council Website
Arts Council England
Goals
Arts Council England, the UK’s foremost arts development agency required a new and contemporary corporate website positioned to be the first point of contact for stakeholders looking to engage with the Arts Council. The site needed to convey the up to date brand values of the Arts Council, creating a contemporary and mature online brand experience.
The site also has to provide a vast amount of information in an accessible and easy to use way, ensuring a positive brand experience throughout. Central to the design requirement was to ensure the Arts Council was ‘more arts, less council’.
It needed to be a useful site too, containing a wealth of documentation from grant applications through to press releases and publications.
Solution
Preloaded developed a full three year website strategy planning growth over time and including a variety of key features and components designed to make the site engaging, relevant and useful. Visual design was a central consideration coupled with strong information architecture and taxonomy, all underpinned by a robust content management system. The site has been developed to ensure it can develop and grow over time, keep current and accommodating of future trends.
The new design came out of several months of research and consultation with artists, arts professionals and the public, as well as a number of the Arts Council’s funded organisations, to find out what they wanted most from the site.
The resulting new site is as easy to use as it is visually engaging, where visitors can use the site to experience art online, discover what’s going on in the arts in their area or find out whether they’re eligible for funding. It contains a wealth of information on the huge range of Arts Council activities and has been developed to help arts businesses operate more efficiently, and also raise public awareness of the arts sector.
New features on the website include
- A pioneering interactive map and smart search engine – to help users search everything from arts listings to funded organisations or regional offices, by entering their location or postcode Profiles of Arts Council funded organisations and their work, which will feature streamed audio and video content
- Access to the Arts Council Collection, including recent acquisitions and online curation projects from leading artists
- A unique “Eligibility wizard”, enabling potential Grants For The Arts applicants to find out whether they are eligible for funding
Results
This is the first phase of an ongoing development for the site. At launch there was a signficant upturn in traffic figures and as additional functionality is added, this will continue to grow.