Play All Day!

I have been talking to my assistant about sprucing up the theatre website over the summer in preparation for next year. In my quest to make the website a welcoming point of contact, I would like to add some fun fact type links to each of the events. The point would be to add some interesting fact about the band, their instruments, place the came from, how the musical form developed, etc. Perhaps the tidbits will help people make decisions about attending shows with names and terms they don’t recognize.

While I said I didn’t want to have look like a website for kids, I did comment that many of the presentation techniques and design elements those websites used were similar to what I was thinking about.

I didn’t visit those websites myself of course having lots of important and serious work to do. I did have to walk behind my assistant many times today though and just happened to see some interesting things over her shoulder.

Many of the websites she visited had some fun online activites for kids like the Chicago Children’s Museum (love the build a bug!)and the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. (some really excellent educational pieces)

Others had activities families could do together at home like the Lincoln Children Museum.

WXPN radio’s Kid’s Corner is sort of fun and inviting too

Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis didn’t have Flash driven activities, but they do have a scavenger hunt contest that encourages kids to explore the entire webpage and offers a free ticket to a show as a reward with the chance to win in a drawing for additional prizes.

I was really surprised that other children’s theatres like those of Seattle, Birmingham and Charlotte didn’t have webpages that were more exciting to kids. The same with the Boston Children’s Museum. While their kids’ activities are educational, they are a little serious and not really geared to get ’em coming back for more. Even more surprising was the Please Touch Museum which had a bright graphic, but was otherwise kinda sterile.

Sure, parents are the ones who have to do the driving and make the decision to go to these places. But kids start surfing the web around 8-10 years old and there is a good chance they might type children and their town name in to Google. Having an exciting webpage that makes them nag their parents can help get people in the door.

My favorite web page hands down then is —Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. Right from the beginning it has a fun chicken you can make dance around. The sublinks “For Kids” “For Parents” “For Educators” and my favorite title- “For Museum Geeks” have been specifically designed to be appealing for those groups.

The kid’s link has lots of funny images and loud goofy noises and links that lead you to all sorts of fun stuff. The parent’s link is a bit more sedate, but clearly communicates that this is a place that will be fun for your kids and of course has many more links than the kid’s section to answer all those questions adults have.

The educator’s link is actually a chalk rendering of the museum with gold stars for links. Maybe not as exciting as the previous sections, but certainly has an appropriate motif. The museum geek section is the most sedate, but has all sorts of trivia along with facts and figures. Still, pretty dang interesting and informative.

About Joe Patti

I have been writing Butts in the Seats (BitS) on topics of arts and cultural administration since 2004 (yikes!). Given the ever evolving concerns facing the sector, I have yet to exhaust the available subject matter. In addition to BitS, I am a founding contributor to the ArtsHacker (artshacker.com) website where I focus on topics related to boards, law, governance, policy and practice.

I am also an evangelist for the effort to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture being helmed by Arts Midwest and the Metropolitan Group. (http://www.creatingconnection.org/about/)

My most recent role was as Executive Director of the Grand Opera House in Macon, GA.

Among the things I am most proud are having produced an opera in the Hawaiian language and a dance drama about Hawaii's snow goddess Poli'ahu while working as a Theater Manager in Hawaii. Though there are many more highlights than there is space here to list.

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