Thank you for requesting an analysis of www.michigantheatre.org. We appreciate many of the design and User Experience (UX) choices made to date. Placing the Upcoming Events in the home screen is a smart choice. Well done. But this evaluation goes beyond telling you that you did a good job and need to focus on SEO, or that your favicon is missing.
No, this information dives into some important usability opportunities and enhancement. Such as, where should a user go after seeing the events on the home page. We would like to share these problems, issues and opportunities with you.
Technical analysis was completed with several tools including those available through pingdom.com, yslow.org, builtwith.com and sucuri.net. Interpretation of that data along with a comparison of the current site design to commonly accepted best practices was completed by Steve Bennett, Kyle Maurer and Joel Worsham.
Site Performance
Speed
A fast loading site is extremely important. Site visitors and search engines expect sites to load quickly and to be able to navigate to subsequent pages without unnecessary wait times. It has been proven that visitors to sites will visit more pages, interact with more features and even purchase more products on faster sites. In addition, many search engines including Google tend to rank faster loading sites higher in their search results.
The michigantheatre.org website is not experiencing debilitating load time issues but there is significant room for improvement. After all, a site can’t possibly be too fast.
We tested the site for speed. Your website’s load time was between 4.23 seconds and its performance grade was 88/100. In English, these numbers tell us that your pages load slowly, sometimes very slow, even though your requests are low.
To facilitate better load times, we would recommend reviewing your choice in hosting provider, implementing multiple levels of caching, reducing the number of images and replacing them with sprites and css elements, using a content delivery network or CDN to transmit images, along with minifying and concatenating scripts and stylesheets to compress data transmission across the web.
Security
We reviewed the site for security issues. There were no reports for malware or blacklisting. However there is an important security consideration.
WordPress out of date
The michigantheatre.org website is powered by WordPress but is currently two major releases behind the latest version of WordPress. Keeping the software that powers your website up to date is the number one way to keep your site secure. We recommend you update immediately all of your plugins, your theme and WordPress and also assign a reminder or a responsible person to periodically ensure that all such software is kept up to date.
Further reading:
User Experience (UX)
Events and ordering tickets
Though the events are listed on the home screen, using the function, “Buy Tickets” leads the end user to the contact us page. This is unexpected behavior and could be remedied with either a built in ticket sales platform or connection to a third party application. Either of which is completely workable from the WordPress platform. Within the past 6 months, software has been developed which allows for scalable ticket sales, will call, and for end users to print their own tickets. Some theaters have seen ticket sales jump to 80% of total sales because customers could print their own tickets. This type of system can reduce Will Call to at or under 5 minutes.
We could also enhance the experience when dealing with events that do not require a ticket by simply removing the link.
Text embedded in images
Years ago we used tools like Photoshop to present artistically styled, aesthetically appealing text on web pages. It was standard practice to create and present images containing text on a site. Today, advancements in website creation tools and web browsers provide more effective options. Now text can be placed on web pages and then styled to present the same visual end product but without requiring the use of images.
Here are a few reasons why it is NEVER a good idea to embed text inside images:
- Text inside images cannot be read by search engines and as a result, no SEO value is added to the page
- Images slow down the loading of your site
- People with disabilities using devices such as screen readers will not be able to read the text
- Visitors on slow connections may be unable to load the images or may simply not see them due to their slower loading times
- Text inside images cannot be translated for visitors wishing to view the page in another language
- Text inside images cannot be scaled and re-sized appropriately based on a user’s screen size which means many visitors will struggle to read the text
- Updating the text in images requires editing the original image file, uploading it to the site and replacing an existing one which is considerably more maintenance work than just changing the text on the page
- Users who increase or decrease the zoom on their browser will see a reduction in quality and readability of the text inside images
- Maintaining aesthetic continuity across the site is more difficult when using images where the colors and fonts cannot be easily modified or inherit the styling of the rest of the site
- Users cannot select, copy and paste text that is embedded in images
On the michigantheatre.org site, text can be found embedded in several images under Get Involved. This is an important issue and should be corrected.
Further reading:
Mobile and Handheld
Your site does feature a responsive design. Good job! This means that the site adapts to the screen size it is being viewed on which is ideal and the standard best practice. However, simply making a site responsive is not enough. It is important to ensure that all visitors to your site are presented with content that is readable and usable, regardless of their screen size.
The michigantheater.org website does get a lot of factors right but there are still a number of usability issues present. Here are just a few worth noting:
- As mentioned in above, text used inside of images is problematic. Visitors to this site on small screens will see all the images reduced greatly in size so that any text within them becomes very difficult to read. Were this text separated from an actual image, the size could be preserved and remain readable. This issue occurs in numerous places throughout the site, especially in the header and on the home page.
- The home page includes great content but on small screens the phone number and directions are hidden down in the footer. The phone number is not actionable. In other words, nothign happens if you touch it on a touch screen. This results in users being unable to call or get directions from you site.
- This is an opinion, but if we could review the analytics, we could see if it should be a fact, the Events Hotline should be listed before the office line because that’s the one that makes you money.
- The Logo runs over the menu at certain widths and could use a css adjustment.
Further reading:
- The case for responsive design
- The business case for responsive design
- Why responsive web design is important
- 6 reasons responsive design is the future
Accessibility
Because the Theatre is a public facing organization we thought you might be interested to know how your site works for people with disabilities. We ran the site with a screen reader active. The results were intriguing. The reader caught the name of the site and began to work through the header and main navigation, but stopped working effectively in the navigation items with sub pages. It also read incorrect information for title items. In the body copy area on the home page, it skipped the description of the theater and began describing empty image names.
Accessibility has become a hot button and one that deserves attention. We recommend working working with an accessibility consultant to update the site for users with disabilities. Doing so would improve usability for those with impairments. This would be a strong tactical move with strategic results. You would separate the Michigan Theater from it’s competitors including the Potter Center, the Jackson Symphony and the local movie theaters. A strong PR move which would speak volumes about your support of the community.
Here are some supporting articles for further thought:
Conclusion
Your website is rich in content, has a responsive layout, is built on WordPress and is relatively easy to navigate. However, there are numerous opportunities to improve and a few issues that should be addressed in the short term.
We’d love to discuss the way these changes could enhance ticket sales and other topics relating to your site in greater detail. If you would like to have a conversation with us to clarify what we’ve outlined above and elaborate further so that you can take action, please don’t hesitate to call or email us:
Phone: (517) 414-2003
Email: kyle@realbigmarketing.com