- Organization Name:
- Triangle Gay Men's Chorus
- Describe your creative piece – what is it and what has it been used for, and why is it innovative?
- With the technical assistance of TechTriad Design (www.techtriad.com), the Triangle Gay Men's Chorus (TGMC) has designed and implemented a redesigned website for our chorus that is supported by Adobe Contribute. Our new site offers user-friendly ways for visitors to get concert information, buy tickets online, see a calendar of events, donate, sign up for our e-newsletter, submit forms electronically (e.g., book the Chorus for an event), get general information about the Chorus or about joining, and read news stories. The site creatively integrates multiple media, including calendars, photos, graphics, video, and social networking. Page layouts offer visual appeal and variety. Visitors can reach key pages via multiple routes. For example, our Events page (www.tgmchorus.org/events) includes links for online ticket purchases. The Events page also includes a link to a news article describing our June concert; the article offers additional direct links to the ticketing pages.
- What issue or problem were you working to address with this piece?
- Our service as a Chorus is to provide quality musical performances to our audiences. An unattractive and unprofessional-looking website can negatively affect people's impressions of our artistic quality. Previously, menus or pages did not always indicate clearly how people needed to navigate our site. If navigation is not intuitive and user-friendly, we can lose prospective audience, volunteers, or members. As a nonprofit with annual budgets well below $50,000, we rely heavily on volunteers, and we must creatively maximize our use of available resources. An important drawback of our former website system also was that only the Webmaster, a volunteer, could change and publish content on our site. Depending on his availability, we risked conveying information or maintaining links that were outdated or inaccurate. Again, these could negatively affect visitors' impression of the quality of our chorus.
- How has your submission successfully impacted your organization’s ability to solve this issue/problem?
- Our redesigned website was launched in late December 2009. As noted in the description of our creative piece, the site is attractive and uses multiple media and varied layouts to enhance the experience of website visitors. Visitors can get information or perform actions with a minimum of clicks and can reach desired destinations multiple ways. One possible indicator of improvement also is the number of hits. In 2008, before we started any redesign work (including work in 2009 with public domain software that we abandoned), we averaged about 8,000 hits per month. To date in 2010, we are averaging more than 18,000 hits per month. Finally, Contribute allows Chorus volunteers with a basic technical background to maintain the site, including updating page content, adding links to new files, creating new pages on the site, acknowledging key supporters, and adding links to other organizations' Web pages. We can publish timely changes, reducing the occurrence of incorrect content.
