Liverpool agency Smiling Wolf has produced the latest version of the Philharmonic Hall’s website. It follows the last major re-design of the site in 2007 by Mando Group. Just how well does the new version stand-up to the benchmark set by Mando for one of the city’s leading cultural institutions?

The Philharmonic Hall is home to the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, one of the oldest concert-giving organisations in the world and rapidly re-establishing itself as a world leading orchestra under its charismatic Russian chief conductor Vasily Petrenko.

The Philharmonic is also a lively music venue in its own right with Razorlight and many other rock, pop and comedy stars regularly playing in the fantastic art deco building. The website therefore has to appeal to a broad audience, and for people who are regular concertgoers or of course new to Liverpool.

Smiling Wolf’s site at first glance marks a big creative shift from the Phil’s relatively restrained brand. We’re seeing lots of colour, photography and big, big web-safe Georgia typeface. Gone are the trademark white pages, sans serif font and tight, tidy layout, SW has introduced new colourways and graphics and most strikingly an abstract background image that contains the centre-aligned content sitewide.

The navigation has been switched away from  the left hand side to push all second-tier pages to a new right hand side menu bar in the centre section. Key functionality such as the booking and contact section is neatly contained in a fixed element at the top of the window.

Brand information is kept separate from sales information by fixing it in separate menu tables to top and bottom with the booking section and multimedia pages (the ‘Phil Channel’) broken-out as quick links top right.

The original site had a very elegant solution to displaying mixed events programming that is central to the Phil’s business, by enabling visitors to search by genre, then dates using a horizontal tabbed menu.

SW have rightly kept this system adding a nice little reminder app for key dates, but on the date of our visit one of the forthcoming dates had disappointingly, a broken link on its secure page.

Seat allocation and pricing via AudienceView has now also been integrated into the booking pages which makes for a more seamless experience for the site user. The box office area appears to be the main are for minor technical bugs and glitches in content (eg: no navigation back to main site, copyright info) which may yet be teething problems.

SW are known as a creative agency, whereas Mando perhaps have the reputation as application developers. This difference is seen both in site design and deployment, with another major departure being the site construction in open source rather than ASP.

With venues becoming more and more reliant on using the web to sell direct to consumer, the Phil’s website will undoubtably be a really important part of their sales and marketing strategy. SW has produced a more accessible, quirky site that may have a broader appeal to users. How this translates into sales will be interesting to watch.

www.liverpoolphil.com