R & R Musical Society – WordPress Site Launch

Another week has rolled around and with it the launch of another WordPress site. The Rathmines and Rathgar Musical Society are celebrating their centenary this year and so they wanted to give their site a bit of an overhaul and to add in some new functionality to mark 100 years of theatrical performances.

In essence the needs for the site were simple enough – promote upcoming shows and be the online hub for info about the R & R Musical society. The site achieves the main goal by prominently promoting the next performance that the R & R have coming up by having a countdown time displayed in the top right. Potential thespians can then click on the link there to find out more info about the upcoming show and purchase tickets.

R & R Musical Society – WordPress Site Launch

Given that the R & R is in its 100th year they wanted their WordPress website to have an archive of everything that has gone before. I’m not much of an historian but I do quite like this aspect of the site. There is a full listing of all previous performances but the real beauty of the site, in my humble opinion, is the archiving of 100 years of show progammes. There is something intriguing about being able to dip back into time and read a programme from 100 years ago.

All of the show programmes are hosted on Issuu.com as to host locally would slow the site down way too much. Then, via a complex system of pulleys and levers, all of the pdfs are accessible via a really nice time line feature. All of the programmes are separated by decade to make it easier to quickly locate a year. If you’d like to see the show programmes from 1913-1919 please be my guest!

Traffic and SEO wise this site will do fine. The R & R Musical Society are very well established (did you hear they’ve been around for 100 years! ;)) and have lots of links to other big organisations (check out the video they did with RTE below [RTE is the national television broadcaster here in Ireland for those of you from elsewhere]) so this site will be well trafficked – which is always nice.

More sites going live this week and I’ll put together a tutorial on how you can create your own PDF timelines in case any of you readers are interested!