The challenge
English National Ballet approached us during the development of their new brand identity, seeking a website that would not only reflect their refreshed look but also engage audiences new to ballet.
The team had identified opportunities to make the site stronger: optimisation enhancements could boost load times and raise sustainability and accessibility scores. Updating the user experience and content structure would make the site more welcoming and intuitive, especially for newcomers discovering ballet for the first time.
With a rich history and plenty of stories to share, the team wanted the website to become a destination for knowledge, through long-form reads and accessible insights into their work and productions.
They wanted to ensure that the website had an editorial feel and reflected their new branding and identity. The aim was to strike a balance between business purpose and beauty: not only to act as a brochure and encourage ticket sales, but also to reflect the fluidity and elegance of the art form, encouraging exploration through design and structure.
The solution
With a tight roadmap to turn around a new website design and build, we jumped right in to understand the team’s goals and audiences.
First on the agenda was a series of internal workshops with the English National Ballet team, designed to evolve their content to place audience needs at the heart while still balancing organisational goals. This set the foundation for focus groups with both regular attendees and non-attenders, used to test and refine our assumptions about how the proposed site structure and updates would engage diverse audiences, especially those new to English National Ballet.
At the beginning of discovery, a preliminary content audit was conducted to help the marketing team get to grips with the scale of the existing site and its extensive historic content. This process allowed us to collaboratively identify key pages, assess what users would find genuinely valuable, and begin shifting from organisation-first to user-first messaging and structure.
Following the delivery of brand design guidelines, our team worked closely with EDIT brand studio to ensure that their designs were accurately reflected in the new website. The website design was informed by our findings from audience research and internal workshops, with elements like user journeys making it clear how and where visitors could find information easily and accessibly.
We then began technical work, scoping out the team’s requirements for the new website. Through this process, we identified several areas to develop or evolve, which would improve the functionality and usability of the site. Thanks to the development of 44 website blocks, the team then had a huge amount of flexibility to build out this audience-first content.
The results
Technical elements included:
- Netflix-style approach to their ENB at Home video content: we reskinned their VimeoOTT project stream, improving user discoverability
- Integrating their in-person class offering with MindBody to help reduce administrative steps through using the MindBody API
- Integrating WooCommerce from Tessitura, for e-commerce and shop sales
- Advanced galleries functionality, like tagging dancers and productions to create dynamically populated galleries
- Restyling of Tessitura’s TNEW platform for support and donations functionality, to keep the user journey retaining the look and feel of the English National Ballet website
- Embedded chatbot with an option to turn the function on and off for specific pages, to better support users navigating through the website
The new website has also shown a massive improvement in accessibility; built to AA to AAA best practice, with a 90%+ score from Google Lighthouse.
The website has successfully transformed English National Ballet’s new branding into an accessible and elegant website. It’s given their team a large amount of flexibility to build user-first content – which, combined with a streamlined user journey, allows them to engage loyal fans and new audiences alike.
